The Job of a Bilingual Healthcare Virtual Assistant
Bilingual healthcare virtual assistants are becoming increasingly popular in the healthcare industry. They are able to provide a level of customer service that is unmatched by any other type of customer service representative. An HVA (healthcare virtual assistant) is a multi-talented virtual professional who is able to take on a variety of different tasks on behalf of a provider or medical system, including: fielding patient inquiries, scheduling appointments, helping with language barriers, and following up with patients about their health or additional services.
Becoming a virtual assistant in healthcare is a meaningful career, helping some of the world’s top medical professionals perform critical work. As a bilingual healthcare assistant, your dedication will ensure that the health systems can deliver great outcomes to every single one of their patients, regardless of any language or culture barriers.
Bilingual healthcare virtual assistants may work in a wide range of capacities within the healthcare field, depending on their individual skills and strengths and which healthcare provider they’re placed with. As a bilingual healthcare virtual assistant, you are responsible for handling the needs of patients and doctors who speak different languages. You would need to be fluent in both English and Spanish, as well as have the ability to communicate with both groups. You should be able to converse easily and demonstrate strong written communication skills in both of your target languages. Your responsibilities may include:
- Providing customer service and support for patients and doctors
- Translating medical records, reports, and other documents
- Scheduling patient’s appointments
- Rescheduling appointments when necessary
- Managing patient information such as demographic data, insurance information, and billing information
- Data entry and electronic medical records management
- Technical support and patient assistance with telemedicine
- Following up with patients to check up on their health or discuss additional appointments and treatments
- General administrative support – clerical, phones, email, organization, staff, and meeting schedules
- Translation services from English to Spanish and vice versa, including live, real-time translations for consultations and meetings
The above is just a partial list of the services that world-class, healthcare virtual assistants can provide. Bilingual virtual assistants operating in the healthcare space improve outcomes for all involved parties by serving as an important human interface between healthcare providers and patients or, in other cases, between two doctors or teams who speak different languages. Healthcare virtual assistants can also be effectively applied in less patient-centric, behind-the-scenes roles, such as administrative and clerical support, standardizing medical records in multiple languages, or serving as a mediator between any two parties of the vast global healthcare network who may need to overcome a language barrier to work together effectively.
Learn more about becoming one of the skilled and compassionate bilingual virtual assistant and how this model adds tremendous value to healthcare systems performing several tasks.
First Things First: What Does a Healthcare Professional Do?
A healthcare professional is responsible for providing care to patients. They may also be responsible for coordinating care and managing medical records. Virtual assistants can help with tasks such as answering phone calls, filing insurance claims, and collecting payments. Essentially, virtual assistants in the healthcare space can work on just about any non-medical aspect of the healthcare field that could benefit from a detail-oriented, bilingual professional. Best of all, you perform all this work by dialing in remotely through your computer, so there is no need for a daily commute to a hospital or office building.
Just about every successful practicing doctor has a team of other dedicated professionals working to support them. This team includes multiple individuals, from the receptionist who checks patients in at the door to the nurse who records vital signs before each appointment to the maintenance staff that works behind the scenes to keep a medical facility fully functional and up to sanitary standards. The best doctor’s office requires much more than just a great doctor. Increasingly, modern healthcare systems—from small private practices to large hospital systems—are finding that adding virtual healthcare assistants is a cost-effective way to reduce workloads of in-house staff and improve the efficiency of operations.
From helping schedule appointments for patients who don’t speak English to ensuring that mission-critical documents are available in both English and Spanish/Portuguese, there is a nearly unlimited list of tasks you might be called upon to perform as a bilingual virtual assistant working in the healthcare space. Here are just some of the ways a virtual assistant can help a busy medical practice run more smoothly:
- Live, real-time translations – a few things can derail a check-up with a new patient or a video call collaboration with a specialist, like a serious language barrier. Having a professional bilingual virtual assistant dialed in to help with these appointments can be an invaluable resource for doctors who don’t speak a second language.
- Help in the back office – when a doctor and their in-house staff are feeling stretched thin due to a backlog of data entry, a scheduling fiasco, an impending EMR (electronic medical records) system conversion, or are simply in need of general administrative support during a particularly busy time, taking on a virtual assistant can be a cost-effective solution.
- Patient tracking and project management – hiring managers at medical facilities often find themselves disappointed by the results of hiring through temporary staffing agencies or searching online for freelance contractors. Virtual assistants are educated, dedicated professionals. As a bilingual virtual assistant, you will be equipped with a variety of tools and skills that will allow you to manage projects and manage patient tracking. Patient tracking allows healthcare providers to monitor a patient’s progress over an extended period of time. Project management could include planning, executing, and organizing a variety of projects such as building additions, or hiring new specialty staff.
What is a Bilingual Healthcare Virtual Assistant?
A bilingual healthcare VA from Virtual Latinos is a professional that provides medical support in both English and Spanish or Portuguese. The service is 100% remote and has a dedicated Latin-based Customer Success Agent included. Customers have the option of a satisfaction guarantee.
Some examples of tasks a bilingual healthcare virtual assistant can help with include: scheduling appointments, filling out forms, answering phones, and updating your EHR system.
Some operations underestimate the value of well-trained bilingual virtual assistants and may think such professionals are only useful in a niche role as translators for English-speaking doctors serving predominantly Spanish-speaking neighborhoods. While this is certainly one important role bilingual virtual assistants can fill, your potential as a virtual assistant goes far beyond that. With so much business today being global, online, or both—including within the healthcare space—responsive, real-time collaboration between professionals who speak different languages or who are in different parts of the world is more crucial than ever. Beyond just translating, a virtual assistant can work on complex projects that require a grasp of both English and Spanish, such as converting electronic medical records from one system to another. A bilingual virtual healthcare assistant can help doctors make and maintain critical global healthcare connections, improving outcomes for patients and their practice alike.
The 3 Tools Every Healthcare Virtual Assistant Should Have
Healthcare may be one of the most difficult sectors to automate since it involves so many parties involved, from hospitals and medical facilities to physicians, pharmaceuticals, research firms, and even the actual patients. Healthcare app logistics have long been among the most difficult and complicated. A healthcare virtual assistant should know how to use a variety of tools to help with tasks such as email, communication, and online marketing, but there are specialized tools for this industry every HVA should know.
1. EMR or EHR (Electronic Health Records)
Clients choose which electronic medical record software to use. VMAs often use Athena, DrChrono, Practice Suite, Onetouch, and Practice Fusion, to name a few.
In a remote work set-up, a secured cloud-based EMR allows smoother access and storage. Other than managing patient records, these EMRs also have revenue cycle management services like billing and patient engagement plans.
2. Lastpass and Authy
A foolproof password is crucial to keep the database secure. Sharing these difficult passwords is tricky, let alone memorizing them. That’s where LastPass comes in. The app saves all passwords for any website, enabling easy access to profiles and accounts.
Authy is a 2-Factor Authentication (2FA) generator app that adds a layer of protection. While LastPass readily inputs passwords, Authy ensures unauthorized logins can be kept from any website or device.
3. Appointment booking software
Appointment booking software is utilized by doctors, private clinics, and, most recently, hospitals. Usually, it consists of two panels, a separate patient-facing panel and a management panel (on the side of the clinic). Its main objective is fairly self-explanatory: it is to streamline the process of booking a doctor’s visit. Patients can easily book an appointment, get notifications about it, provide relevant information to the doctor beforehand, and also reschedule or cancel the appointment.
From the management side, it allows the clinic to have a transparent and easily analyzed view of their doctors’ schedules. For the clinic’s reception, it is a good way to streamline the mundane tasks of confirming and rebooking all scheduled appointments.
Bilingual Healthcare Virtual Assistant Jobs Through Virtual Latinos
Virtual Latinos is a company that helps bilingual virtual assistants find work. Virtual Latinos uses a variety of tools to help virtual assistants develop long-term work relationships, including a platform for bilingual healthcare virtual assistants to find work and telehealth virtual assistant jobs within companies from many parts of the world.
Are you a bilingual business professional who believes you would be a good fit working with doctors and other healthcare providers in the fast-paced world of medicine? Becoming a virtual healthcare assistant offers you the chance to get paid for meaningful, life-saving work with the flexibility of a virtual model. To learn more about what it’s like to be a member of the Virtual Latinos community, check out our virtual assistant jobs.
