Virtual Assistants & Evolving Medicine

Introduction and Company Overview 0:00

everyone, I have someone super special with me today. Amanda, they're is though. And she is awesome. She's a really passionate individual, really passion for life in work and personal life. And she has this company called Mind Mountain Mover, which is a really cool name, and it's really born out of a desire to transform business, around the world, and also enriching the lives of thousands of business owners and the employees that work within them. Her thoughtful leadership style and motivation to achieve success has created one of the fastest growing outsourcing companies, which actually, I would argue that's a insourcing company.

And we'll talk about that in a second. In the United States, primarily focus on the health care industry, which is awesome that she's on today. And she looks forward to contributing to economical solutions, which we need economical solutions within the health industry that could be utilized by by any, any businesses. So, Amanda, welcome. Welcome to the show. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. So, so, first of all, I just have to get something out of the way for as my mountain mover, I want to know where you came up with the name.

What? How? How did that even come up in the first place? Well, we wanted to create something that represented what our Vas are capable of. So when we first kind of work together. Your virtual assistants. You mean virtual assistants? Yep. Yeah. So when we were toying around with the name, we wanted to do something that represented everything that they were capable of. Because when you think of a virtual assistant, people are like, oh, like the companies that are you call in and you know, they have an accent and on the phone it's hard to understand them.

Right? No, it's not what a virtual assistant is. There's so much more. So we wanted to kind of think of a name that could embody that. So we had think of maybe we call them busy bees or worker bees. But then when we kind of came up with the name My Mountain Mover, it really embodied what we wanted our Vas to represent. They're actually moving mountains for businesses all around the world, cactuses all around the world, and also to my faith is very important to me. And so it's it's a cool reference as well.

Naming Mind Mountain Mover and VA Basics 2:23

Great. I mean, that's such an impactful name and it's really gutsy to even put it out there because, you're really promising a lot with that name. Mountain moving. Correct? He has exactly the no small feat, the kind of mountain. So. But I believe in our Vas. Gotcha. So. So I'll tell you this. Most of us of our audience have probably don't know what a virtual assistant is. So we're kind of start from the basics a little bit. And I'm going to help define a little bit. So sure. So so virtual assistants are exactly what like what it sounds.

They assist you virtually. They may not be within your medical practice. They may be offsite somewhere outside the country. So, I've been working with virtual assistants for ten plus years in multiple different companies. And even in, Texas Center for Lifestyle Medicine. We have, a third of our staff, are actually virtual assistants. And, yeah. And it's great because really allow us to do the things that we want to do allows my, my in-person employees to really take command of a leadership role.

And it really drives a lot of value to the company and the culture to the company. And so, so in the healthcare field, there's a there's a huge hesitation. I know, because I've talked to a lot of people and as you said, it's like, okay, well, maybe they're outside the country or they're another area, and maybe my patients don't understand what they're saying. How does my staff communicate with them? Like, I'm on the shoulder, you know, like that's for me. Yeah. That that's where the hesitation is. Yes.

And there's there's a higher level of hesitation is that a lot of leaders don't know how to lead someone who's virtual. Right. Yes. And so can you, can you kind of address those. Yeah I completely agree. There is especially like you said, there's this component of not having them in the office, but there's also on top of this fear is this fear of patient information. Right. The security aspect of our virtual assistants. And I think, you know, when we're introducing the idea of a virtual assistant to, primary physicians or doctors or business owners, their first question is, okay, I'm all for it.

It sounds like a great concept, but I have no idea how to actually implement this into my practice. And this is where we, I think we excel in because we do not leave you on your own. And as a part of my mountain mover, it was very important to me that from the start of the conversation that you have to the point of hiring, there is someone to guide you every single point and every single point along the way. So you're assigned an industry manager to make sure that you're successful with your VA.

So we go through all the hoops. All of our virtual assistants have to be Hepa certified. They take training courses. They go through a rigorous vetting process we walk you through to make sure that these videos are going to be okay in your practice. You know, and once you kind of get over that hurdle, I think Covid actually has been kind of a weird blessing in disguise in this ways that practices are kind of forced to go virtual now, you know, so it's opened an opportunity for people to be more interactive virtually.

Right. We're talking through zoom right now. You know, you can call your doctor on the phone. So it's starting to get a little bit more natural in the healthcare space to go virtual, which is great. Yeah, I think you're right. I think coronavirus situation, the pandemic has really allowed the consumers of health care, the patients, to adopt on to technology platforms. Now they're used to zoom. Right now they're used to doing telemedicine. There's there's like an expectation. In fact, there's there's a study that was done on the Mayo Clinic in June of 2021, very recently just published, looking at how, 43% of patients actually prefer telemedicine.

And I think that's really under, under, underpowered because, there's it depends on the age group.

Healthcare Adoption and Virtual Support 6:29

And we were trying to see and so that was the more predominantly like, Medicare population older probably. Yeah. 43% of those patients were telemedicine. Like something shifted dramatically. Yeah. There's a fear of leaving the home. There's also people have a hard time driving. So the access to health care is not great. And so within 2020 there were multiple changes. The center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, proposed, and a lot of them had to do with, hey, all these reimbursable codes that you used to have to do in person.

Hey, you can actually do some medicine and telemedicine. Yep. I'm like, cool. We can definitely do that. So we actually switched our practice from about 5% telemedicine to 86% telemedicine. Wow. Within no lie. Within three weeks. That's awesome. We had we had three locations, and we actually decided to close down the other two and focus on our main location and eventually move our main location to another location. So we actually decrease our fixed costs, but we tripled down on our virtual assistants during that time.

And part of the reason is because there's this there's this, definition of, of, of people in the workplace within private practice. So you've your doctor, you have your nurse practitioner or physician assistant and you have medical assistance, you have office manager, you know, front office, you in the back office. Right. So this is your core. So what we decided to do was like, let's, let's, let's instead of just labeling it, let's see what are the responsibilities of each person. And who can do a virtual.

You does not have to be in person to do it. And that came out of the pandemic. So when we put this all on a whiteboard, we realized that, okay, medical systems like have like four different columns, and the front office has this back office this. And we realized that why not just allocate the responsibilities and create a role out of it for our virtual assistants? And that's what dramatically improved the way that we actually deliver care, to our patients. So so I do agree with that. But it does take some sitting down and planning and thinking about what how that could possibly work.

So you said earlier that you have people within your company, and let's say that someone hires a virtual assistant through your company so that there's there's someone to to walk the practice through how that virtual system integrates into the practice. Yes, yes, exactly. And I think this is kind of unique to mem by Mountain Mover. Because most of our other virtual assistant companies, it's like, okay, you get in the door, you get your VA. Great. Okay, now you're all good and have fun with your virtual assistant.

But that is the wrong approach, especially in the healthcare space when virtual assistants are kind of just, you know, getting into the healthcare industry, they need to feel like they're supported. So what we do is we assigned an industry manager specifically to your account. So if your practice was to come in and you hired 1 or 2 virtual assistants, you would be assigned an industry manager who would meet with you. Make sure that all of your systems and your software are set up and ready to go with their virtual assistant on their start date.

So by the time that they start, they're ready to go. And we set up monthly check ins to make sure that you're okay with your virtual assistant. What are your concerns? What are your 3016, 90 day expectations for your virtual assistant? So we really try to make sure that there's a structure in place for your supported. So it's basically like not only are you getting a virtual assistant, but you're almost always already getting a manager to manage your virtual assistant, too, which I think is really helpful for doctors, especially because often what we see is that these doctors come to us to the point of exhaustion.

They're like kind of at their wit's end. They are very overworked. They really want to focus back on their patient care, but they're losing that ability to because of the admin burden. And we hear this term, you know, it's all over the place, but it's actually incredibly real. And our virtual assistants can be part of that solution for those doctors. Well you mentioned administrative burden, right. What is what is what does that mean to you? What does that look like to you? To the to the to the doctors that, that come to you guys?

Do they really. Yeah. So we specialize not only in like your normal internal medicine or primary care, but we have special teams across the board, which makes us really unique because we can find a virtual assistant really to specialize in what you need. So, yeah, I think there is just this gap in what physicians are actually capable or what they were trained to do. All right. If you're a physician, you did not sign up to go to business school. And we have a lot of small to medium sized private practice.

So they don't when they try to start their own company, they're in it to provide better patient care. Right? They're not in it to run a business often. And it's this huge struggle for them. So what our Vas do is alleviate that back and burden so they can answer your incoming phone calls. Like you said, they can provide, charting. They can do patient scheduling. They can do inbound and outbound calls for you. That's that's kind of what our Vas are really, really good at is relieving any of those tasks that you technically really shouldn't be doing.

You know, that you don't excel in. You can hand that off to a VA and really get back to the things that only you can do as a doctor for you, right? You know, we didn't really sign up to go to business school and sometimes before since you that that the sort of mindset to learn on our own. Yeah. A steep learning curve. I've been there. I'm kind of still there. So it's a really steep learning curve. Yes, but I think that, and I'll tell you my experience with virtual assistants in general is that,

Cost Savings and Common VA Use Cases 12:40

is that, you know, I've been working with Vas for, for ten years, and, and every time it's like you're training from the ground up. And you're right, I'm never really experienced the company that kind of walks you through, you know, 30, 60, 90 days, what you expect and more of a leadership style. So I do think that's a very welcoming thing. So, but there's also people that are watching this that are already familiar with virtual assistants. And I know they are, because I know a lot of the people who are watching this and what they've done is what I've done before in the past is they go on a, on a, on a platform like Fiverr, for example, or, or what is that freelancer.

Dot com and stuff like that. And, and they have these Vas and they have bad experiences with it. And because either there's a link or there is not, there's not necessarily training or expectation that's really set up this way. But it was like a cheap thing to kind of go into and dabble into, right? Yes. So, so, so, so my pain point just from a few years ago and doing this is that you almost have to like, build a structure around the virtual assistant support that. And that actually took a lot of time, out of out of my work and my responsibilities to do that.

And so, but how do you how do you compare that experience to what you got going on? My mountain mover. Yeah, that's a good point. It's so disheartening to hear that, too, because we have clients that are like that, too. And they said, well, you know, I don't know. I've had a bad experience in the past and with if you were to go on, you know, freelancer or Fiverr, those Vas are independent contractors, right? They are with multiple clients. They're not committed to your practice. They're really just in it for the quick buck, you know, and they don't have any reason to stay with you.

Right. So what's what is beautiful about my mountain mover is that we truly, honestly, only hire the top 2% of all applications that come in. We are extremely picky with who we let into the company, right? Because of that exact reason, we want to make sure that our virtual assistants, from the moment that you hire them, they are going to be a value add to your company or to your practice. So we make sure that we incentivize them to stay right. So it's a combination of their salary. We want to make sure that there's they're compensated as well so that it motivates them to stay.

We make sure that we give them bonuses. We make sure that we provide health insurance for them. We make sure that if they don't work out with one client, they have, a chance at another client, you know? So there's a lot of backend work that my mountain mover does to ensure that you're going to have a good experience with your VA, and you don't you don't have to worry about those things. Right? We that's why you pay us is because we take care of that. So you don't have to. Have you all looked at, cost savings when it comes to a practice using virtual assistants?

Apple. Yeah, we've done it a little bit. We've calculated it's around a 60 to 70% savings compared to a, a medical assistant that you would hire in California. So I'm in California. A medical assistant goes for around 5000, $5,500 a month. Right. You could get a virtual medical assistant for 18, 25 a month, full time, still, even probably even more support than you would with a medical assistant, because we have that industry manager there to walk you through the platform and you're not having to pay for a computer, you're not having to pay for office space, you're not having to pay for employment insurance or health insurance for them.

So it kind of alleviates all of those extra fees that you would normally would have to pay for an in-person medical assistant. Great. So so let's talk about some use cases, that your clients have. How do they how do they currently utilize your virtual assistants? Yeah. Great question. So this kind of ranges based on the specialty of the practice. But our very, most common job role that we offer is our medical receptionist role. So these are medical receptionists. Their job description is, is basically like your very own receptionist, except it's virtual.

So they answer incoming and outgoing patient calls. They handle prescription refills. They handle the patient calendar scheduling appointments for you. They handle lab results, X-rays, any sort of that medical receptionist role is a very common one that we provide that we see a lot. Another one that we see a lot is our medical scribes. So this one is actually maybe what I'm most excited about. Because it's just a huge our doctors get so excited that we could even offer something like this to them.

So what their medical scribes do is that if you're a doctor and you're seeing a patient, right, you could have your virtual assistant either live on an iPad or you're recording the session and you can send it to them. Send it to the virtual assistant in your EMR, right. And they can be live charting for you while you're seeing your patient. Right? Because they all know no one likes to go into the doctor's office and just have your doctor just sitting there on a computer, not really even interacting with you.

Right? Because they have to document, you know, that's just our world there. The technology is even kind of falling behind in the healthcare space, and they have to make sure they document. So what our VA's do is they kind of take that out of the equation, or the doctor has to do at the end of the visit is checked to make sure that everything's then. Okay. Okay, great. You're ready to send in this refill. You need to send in this prescription and it's all good to go. So we see a lot of that. Plus we offer other job roles such as medical billers coders, RPM assistants, you know, we name it.

So that's that's great. So, I'm curious, do you feel like or have you gotten any reports that a lot of physician practices feel like they serve their patients better in this way, compared to the conventional way? I think so, I think so, you know, when you have more staff on hand, the experience just gets better. Right? And if your doctor is able to see more patients in a more effective way, then it just lends itself to a better office environment. So we definitely have seen some great results. One of our clients, she had her virtual assistant go back through all of her previous billable hours, and this virtual assistant was able to find $40,000 of missed billable hours that they were able to recover because of that virtual assistant.

So it's just so exciting to see cases like that, you know, whether these virtual assistants are really, really paying for themselves and increasing the bottom line of the practice. So, yeah, billable hours. That's, that's that's actually a big one for,

Founding Story and Lessons Learned 19:48

2021. And that is because, there's now units of time that physicians and, physician assistants and respective owners can bill. And these correlate with timing codes that are with digital communication with the patients as well as phone communication. And if you're the doctor talking to the patient's doctor without the patient being there completely separate. There's an interpersonal communication code that we can get reimbursed for now. And these are all brand new. And most of it started in 2020 and 2021.

There's a whole new set of things that are there. And so, a lot of doctors are saying missing out on these opportunities, but because they're actually there, we actually engineered a lot of our workflow processes for digital communications. Hey, we know that we're going to get paid for this five minute phone call. So why not put that into our revenue model and then designate a day we're doing phone calls for these for these, labs that are coming back and stuff like that, rather than having to wait like four weeks for another appointment.

So and so, but we couldn't have done that without our virtual assistants. And so. Yeah, so, and so the other thing is that, we have a few providers who only come into the office 1 or 2 days a week. The rest they're at home doing telemedicine. And, and my thought is like, well, if you're at home doing telemedicine, we don't really need an in-person, medical assistant to be helping you triage. We need that to be done virtually. So there's a lot of virtual virtual visits going on. So, you know, so that's why I say like, don't for the people who are watching this, they don't just think that your medical assistant is like one whole unit divide some of that work, whatever can be done virtually, which is like 90%, can be done virtually and now that person can, can, focus on the in-person inpatient visits as well.

And the concept and productivity, which is that if you spend 60 minutes doing four different projects, you have a loss of transition time between the projects and the conglomerate effort is much less so if you've been spent 60 minutes doing one thing. And so the so that productivity is, accelerated when you have your medical assistance or your bill or whoever it is, do like with this one specific thing so they don't have to be interrupted on it. And that's a huge value added. And that's huge money, saved to decrease our FTE, which is full time employee expenses as well.

So I think there's there's multiple levels of cost savings that virtual assistants, can have. Yeah. And so and so that's a lot of things that we talk about in other parts of the summit as well. So so this all sounds fabulous. So let me ask you, a little more personal questions, like, why does you what did you start this company and what are what are the core values? Yeah, that's a great question. So our owner, he has several companies, mainly in the real estate world. So when I first started out with him, I was actually hired on to do marketing for his company.

So my background is actually in marketing. And at that time I had ten virtual assistants actually assisting me with marketing various companies. So we really that kind of just set the spark right. We had never experienced virtual assistant. It's I don't even know what a virtual assistant was. I was like, why tell me if you have an employee halfway around the world, how is that even going to work for marketing? You know, it's definitely a learning curve. In the beginning, but once we kind of got down what we needed from them, it was just remarkable what I value at they were not only in the savings because our ROI was going up on every single project, because things that would have taken me thousands of more dollars to get done, I was able to just hand it off to the VA and for, you know, 17, 25, 18, 25 a month.

And it was getting done, you know, so there was just a huge value out there, there just level of compassion. And their work culture in the Philippines is so different than in America. They're hungry for the job. They're willing to work and want to provide for their families. So, we saw that in them, and we looked at each other and we're like, you know what? We can do this. There's an opportunity here for businesses that need sort of this basic admin office, back end support that's really difficult to get right.

You have to go through a huge, huge amount of applications. It takes months to hire normally, and then you finally get someone who's just an average person, right. So for our virtual assistants, that kind of set off the idea and set off the spark for us to want to do this. But then a global pandemic hit and this kind of really changed our focus of what type of virtual assistant company do we want to have? What is the value here? And like I said earlier, Covid, you know, actually kind of spurred this momentum towards virtual assistants because of, you know, the environment that we were in.

Everyone had to stay home. They had to learn how to adapt to work on home. They needed my needed help. So it just opened up the doors for people to be more willing to have a virtual assistant. So we started, we launched, we gained some traction in the healthcare space because of, you know, telehealth exploding, exploding. So that's kind of how we started. It was just spur of the moment. We had virtual assistants. We had a great kind of experience with them. We saw the potential. There wasn't really anyone out there that was doing virtual assistants on a large scale done well, you know, and we thought, you know what?

We can do this. So that's how we started. You know, that's that's, we always get triumph out of need, right? Yes. So, let me ask you a bit of a harder question. What do you know now that you wish you knew when you first started this team? This is a tough question because I am so young, so I feel like I still am learning so much. I've never run a company and never started a company before. And that has its own unique challenges. But I wish I would have

Future Growth and Closing Thoughts 26:38

just maybe done it before. I think the Trial by Fire is just maybe my life mantra nowadays. You know, you'd never know how it's going to be. And if you just sit in your fear and kind of just, well, what if we do this? Or what if we do this and you're analyzing you content center almost gets that in your overanalyzing rather than just committing to doing it right. We're going to do this. We're going to do it well. I think there was a passion there on my end, you know, of really wanting to provide good quality help for businesses across the US.

Well, that's that's our mission statement. It's and it's providing amazing people for businesses around the world. But on bridging the lives of thousands. You know, it's really hard to combine, running a business with actually giving back to the community to, you know, and I saw the opportunity that we could do for this company, the Philippines needs our help, right? They are looking for jobs. It's providing for families. And businesses need a better solution for their virtual assistant. So it just was, you know, a win win.

So I wish I would have just had that faith in myself earlier. Yeah I know that's a great one. I think we can all identify with that. As physicians as well. We all sort of is this imposter syndrome kind of going in. And most of us still do. I still do, actually. And, and we have that sort of mentality. But that's where the, that's where growth is. And that's why a lot of people are listening on the summit. It's an automation that, it's all about growth and it's all about sort of personal development.

So I think that's, that's a beautiful, beautifully said. So, you know, earlier we talked about the Philippines, and, and, and that need there, but I want to talk about us a little bit. But so what we found is that we, people have this understanding that, hey, there's an employee that's taking up a space of someone's heart of the US. That's that's not necessarily a good thing. We found the opposite. Our virtual assistant allow us to create more positions, locally. And it allows us to create higher leadership positions within, within our system.

And those are the things that are scalable. So I want people to understand that with virtual assistants, it's easier to get into this. And if you really passionate about, hey, hiring the US people would want so so am I. You know, that's why I hire, military veterans, for example. Right. But it allows people to be hired and trained within the leadership role. Much earlier on is the scaling is much better, a much higher. And that is going to create a lot of jobs in the US as, as well. So some people disagree with me, but that's really the the way I see it, you know as well. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So great.

Yeah. So, so one, one last thing. Before we jump off here is, you know, with the world, going the way it is right now with, global pandemic, right. The healthcare industry looks a lot more virtual, within different levels of engagement and necessarily doing procedures and stuff like that. But really just talking about, the engagement with, with, with physicians in general. And so, so where do you see this company? What do you see? You like a year from now? What does what does that look like? Yeah, we are in full growth mode and I'm mountain mover.

We have never been more busy. I think the virtual assistants are just going to get more and more relevant to this space, which is exciting. Kind of our next big project that we have is launching into the dental industry. This is a very kind of untouched industry for virtual assistants. And but it's so similar to, you know, medical in a lot of ways. So that's very exciting for us. That'll be in the works. We're developing a whole comprehensive training program for our virtual assistants, because when you have we think of our virtual assistants like our employees. Right.

So when you have your employees, you want to invest in them. And the best way to invest in them, besides, obviously compensation is by training them. And expanding their knowledge base, right. That that leads to better retention. So we're really working on making sure that our virtual assistants can learn more if they can become better at their skills, they can learn more, they can become us friends if they want to. You know, over thinking of that idea of of for these virtual assistants that they want to become licensed in the US.

Let's get you licensed in the US. So that's where I see us just really being the thought leader in the space. We want it to be an experience with their virtual assistants. So when you step foot in my mountain, where you're not just getting a virtual assistant, you're getting the support that your practice needs to grow, right? So that's where I see us in the future. Wonderful. Thanks a lot. Well, awesome. Well, thanks for being on. If you guys want to know more, there's a link that's with this video.

Just go ahead and click on it's, with some freebies that are there for you guys as well. So, I'm going to sort of part with this one thought of this whole interview is, is I, I feel like we're we're finally in an era where we're, we're forced ten years ahead with the coronavirus, maybe 20 years ahead. And that's where the technology and, virtual assistants in, in the world is getting a lot smaller. The best thing to do and the best thing to, to, talk with companies that you want to work with for you guys that are listening, is that where is the company going?

Is the company focused more on sales and strategy? Was a company focused on developing what they already do well. So working with companies that want to develop and essentially what they already do well to keep up with an industry that is more important been than anything. I've worked with a lot of different companies as well, and so that it sounds like, it sounds like that's what you guys are doing at my mind to. So I really want to thank you and appreciate you for that. So thank you. So thank you so much.

I appreciate being on. Yeah. All right. Thanks a lot. Have a good one. Thank you. For you too.