With current employment shortages and rising labor costs, most healthcare employers are seeing rising overhead associated with labor. In private practice, this is especially true and can be felt particularly hard. Turnover among healthcare workers is high, and in private practice, there are significant costs associated with hiring new staff members and training them. For this reason, having reliable staff is particularly important. Below, we look specifically into hiring a new medical assistant, including what qualities and skills to look for and how to determine what to offer as compensation.
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Qualities of a good medical assistant
The first question when approaching the hiring process is what characteristics to look for in a good medical assistant. Qualities and experience to assess when looking to hire a good medical assistant include:
Technical skills and prior experience
Ideally, the MA has prior experience in healthcare. Obviously, if it’s in your specialty, even better, but prior outpatient care is also useful. Having several years of experience can reduce the learning curve. Just realize that candidates with more experience will likely request higher pay.
If they have experience with the same EMR you’re using, this is especially helpful as their onboarding will be much easier.
Depending on your patient population, having a medical assistant that is bilingual can be a highly useful quality as well.
Soft skills and personal qualities of a good medical assistant
A lack of previous healthcare experience isn’t an automatic disqualifier if you find a candidate that fits your private practice. Soft skills can be as important as technical skills and experience and shouldn’t be overlooked during the interview process.
When assessing a new medical assistant, they need to be enthusiastic and willing to learn new skills. We cannot overstate the importance of the MA being flexible and able to adapt to new environments and challenges.
Someone who is organized can help your practice stay organized too, especially in a typical busy private practice where you need to stay tight with the patient schedule.
Frequently, patients are more comfortable around the MA than the doctor, and the sign of a high quality MA is the ability to put the patient at ease. They should have the emotional intelligence to relate to the patient and their concerns, allay their fears, and facilitate the plan implementation of the physician.
Assessing a potential medical assistant hire for your private practice
An aspect that is under emphasized when hiring staff, including a medical assistant, is their ability to integrate with the existing staff members on the team. Each office or group of team members tend to have their own unique vibe, and given that they spend at least forty hours per week working alongside each other, it is critical they be able to integrate well with each other.
As candidates stand out during the interview process, ask the prospective interviewees to spend several hours alongside the existing team members. Also ask your current staff for their input on the candidate’s personality and relatability.
Even motivated and excellent staff members can run into challenges if the coworker environment is hostile and unfriendly. By assessing fit ahead of time, you can greatly reduce the possibility of issues after you’ve invested the time, effort, and money bringing them onboard with your practice.
How to determine what to pay when hiring a medical assistant
The typical MA salary is a fixed hourly salary plus benefits. Pay can vary significantly based on the local economic factor such as cost of living (COL) and how large the candidate pool is. Given the wide range of hourly rates, it’s important to assess local, relevant data when determining an offer of pay for a MA.
You can start by speaking with colleagues to get an idea of what they’ve been paying their medical assistants. This firsthand knowledge can be extremely valuable, especially if you know how well they’ve done with staff retention. A practice with a high turnover rate might not be the best basis for your offer, but is useful information either way.
You can also check online resources. This includes salary sites such as Glassdoor and job openings other practices have posted in your local area on sites such as LinkedIn and Indeed. Compare your hiring criteria to theirs (remember, the more experience required, the higher the pay) along with your benefits package. See where you fit in among your competition for candidates.
Performance based incentives for MAs
The typical medical assistant pay structure provides little motivation to room the extra patient, be diligent about documentation, or go the extra mile when on the phone with a patient. Consider staff pay incentivization when designing the medical assistant’s pay structure.
By creating a pay for performance system with key performance measures, staff can be incentivized in their pay. Metrics to consider when building your incentive structure include:
Documentation
Number of patients seen
Results from patient satisfaction surveys
Practices often see dramatic quality improvements with the implementation of these types of incentive structures. With a set up such as this, it’s possible to hire and keep quality staff members.
How to recruit a new medical assistant
Hiring a new medical assistant can be challenging, especially when you’re having a hard time finding candidates to interview. There are different ways to find potential candidates for your practice:
Ask your current staff for word of mouth referrals, which can often be the best way to find good candidates, as your staff isn’t going to want to work with someone that isn’t a right fit for your practice
Post on job boards such as Indeed or LinkedIn (some postings can be free)
Reach out to training programs in the area and let them know you’re hiring
Use a staffing agency or recruiter (this is going to be the most expensive option, but can help when the need is urgent)
Depending on the specific needs of your practice, you can also consider hiring a virtual medical assistant for your practice.
Related PSG Perks:
GSD Associates provides full-time and part-time virtual assistants for a comprehensive range of administrative, sales, marketing, and management services, with a focus on enhancing efficiency and productivity. Their mission is to streamline and optimize business management for physicians and other professionals, offering efficient solutions that free up valuable time and resources. Use our PSG partnership inquiry form for 10% off your first year of services.
Edge Health provides college educated remote employees that work full time for your practice. They perform tasks such as primary or secondary phone support, billing, claims, insurance verifications, scribing, social media, and other tasks. Practices tend to use the services in multiple different ways. They are trained prior to starting in your office, and the cost is substantially less than what you would pay an in-house employee. To learn more about Edge's services and schedule a demo, and receive $500 off each of your first 3 months, connect through our affiliate link.
Learn more about how physicians can use virtual assistants.
Conclusion
Your medical assistant plays a vital role in your private practice and can greatly reduce the amount of administrative burden you have to personally take on. They are someone you’ll work with day in and day out, so make sure when assessing candidates to hire, you focus not just on their ability to perform the responsibilities of the role, but that they fit well into your practice personally.
Additional resources for doctors running private practices
Explore related resources from PSG: