Virtual Teams in Healthcare: Common Pitfalls and How to Solve Them

Solving the Challenges of Virtual Teams

Virtual collaboration in healthcare is already proving a popular system, and this also extends to the administrative side of things. The challenges of virtual teams, however, have proved off-putting to many healthcare businesses. Nonetheless, the benefits of virtual teams, as we’ll discuss later, are plentiful. Accordingly, it’s important you rise to these challenges to reap the rewards on offer.

Hello Rache wants to help get you there, so we’re broken down these challenges and served up the perfect solutions for solving them:

• Challenge #1 – Data Privacy Concerns
  

  • Healthcare organizations handle sensitive patient data, and working with virtual assistants can create risks of data breaches. Likewise, ensuring compliance with laws like HIPAA can be challenging when working with remote teams, especially if your virtual assistants are in regions where data protection regulations are less strict. Not treating data privacy with the respect and attention it demands can quickly compromise patient trust and result in financial penalties.

• Solution: Enhance Your Data Security

  • Ramping up your security measures allows you to solve the majority of data privacy concerns. Make sure your virtual team always works within secure data-sharing platforms – such as Microsoft Teams – to protect communications, secure patient data by installing VPNs, and always encrypt outgoing communications such as emails.

• Challenge #2 – Time Zone Differences

  • One of the beauties of working with virtual assistants is that you have a global roster of talent to choose from. However, one of the main challenges of virtual teams is that the members are often located in different time-zones. This can easily result in time-delays not just between the team and your healthcare practice, but between individual team members. These delays can hold up important projects and harm your ability to swiftly respond to patient inquiries.

• Solution: Schedule Working Hours to Overlap

  • If you want to manage virtual assistants in different time zones efficiently, why not co-ordinate their working hours to overlap? This allows you to maintain effective communication during critical periods, such as the changeover from day staff to night staff. Using tools like Google Calendar and Teams Calendar, you can arrange meetings to establish handovers and maintain continuity.

• Challenge #3: Limited Medical Knowledge

  • Many virtual assistants come purely from an administrative background, and this can put off healthcare professionals who want assistants with a basic understanding of medical terminology, medical billing, and compliance regulations. Employing virtual assistants without the relevant knowledge, and far removed from the rest of the team, increases the risks of mistakes which could easily impact patient care.

• Solution: Healthcare Virtual Assistants

  • Instead of wasting time and resources on training up administrative virtual assistants, you can choose to work with experienced healthcare virtual assistants. These individuals come pre-loaded with a wealth of healthcare experience and knowledge, such as being fully HIPAA trained, meaning that you can rest assured they’re ready to hit the ground running and tackle their tasks successfully.

• Challenge #4: Communication Barriers:

  • Accurate and effective communication is crucial in healthcare, but working with virtual assistants based all over the world often leads to communication barriers. Language differences, unclear expectations, and a lack of face-to-face interactions can all combine to create a tsunami of misunderstandings and confusion, leading to a drop in productivity and vital tasks going uncompleted. 

• Solution: Use Clear Communication Methods

  • Naturally, the key to solving communication barriers is by working with virtual assistants who are fluent English speakers. However, one of the major challenges of virtual teams remains keeping levels of interaction high and delivered in a simple manner. Centralized communication tools such as Microsoft Teams and Slack allow real-time communication to keep virtual teams together.

• Challenge #5: Keeping Quality Consistent:

  • It’s difficult, when working with virtual teams, to guarantee consistent quality. After all, virtual assistants work remotely, and this minimizes the vision that healthcare practices have on their performance. This can lead to inconsistencies and, consequently, a drop in the level of service offered to your patients. Also, the lack of readily available information on performance can make it difficult to justify investing in virtual teams.

• Solution: Use KPIs and Technology

  • It’s essential, if you want to succeed with virtual teams, that you set quantitative KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to measure the performance of your remote workers. These enable you to evaluate their abilities in the workplace and determine whether they’re performing to the level you expect. This provides you with the necessary data to conduct performance reviews and advise where improvements are needed.

• Challenge #6: Technology Issues

  • Virtual assistants rely on the internet to complete their daily duties, but one of the challenges of virtual teams is ensuring that they have reliable internet connections and access to the latest software. Patchy internet connections can hinder your virtual teams’ productivity and outdated software puts you at risk of cyberattacks. Accordingly, this puts many business owners off the concept of virtual teams.

• Solution: Provide Reliable Tools and Infrastructure:

  • Setting up reliable, and up to date, cloud-based software for your virtual assistants to access your healthcare systems immediately solves any issues related to accessing software. Through these virtual connections, your virtual teams can access the latest versions of tools such as Microsoft Office. It’s also important that you verify the performance of your virtual assistant’s connections with speed tests to ensure smooth, uninterrupted operations.

• Challenge #7: Team Integration:

  • Remote workers often feel isolated, impacting on their motivation, dedication, productivity. Working alone can quickly lead to virtual assistants feeling disconnected from their team. This usually results in a drop in productivity and a lack of engagement. So, one of the challenges of virtual teams is making sure this doesn’t happen, as its impact will be felt most keenly in the quality of service you offer you patients.

• Solution: Encourage Team Interaction

  • Luckily, this is one of the challenges of virtual teams which can be solved relatively quickly. By holding regular meetings and brainstorming sessions – over digital platforms – you can help build a sense of belonging for the members of your virtual team. This will boost morale and provide you with a much happier and productive team who can help serve your patients with the service they deserve.