Managing Virtual Healthcare Staffing
With the move to electronic health records in almost every sector of the healthcare industry from primary, private practices, to clinics to the largest hospitals, healthcare providers see the need for virtual healthcare staffing or remote medical coding to meet the ever-increasing demands of Electronic Healthcare Records and insurance billing. Virtual teams are teams of people who are physically separated by time and/or space, who primarily interact electronically, and who may meet face-to-face occasionally to facilitate work. There are many reasons for healthcare coding teams to be at different locations because of the new realities facing healthcare companies and providers, such as:
- Organization-wide projects or initiatives
- Alliances with different entities that may be global or national including remote coding labs for medical records
- Emerging markets in different geographic locations
- Need to reduce costs and/or cycle time or time-to-market
- Mergers and acquisitions
- Shared knowledge communities
Generally, virtual teams are either task-oriented (such as software development or medical records keeping and billing) or command-oriented (such as a national sales team).
The team's purpose and performance goals must be clear, and the team must be committed to achieving them. Virtual teams then need to have a complementary set of skills that typically fall into three categories: technical/functional expertise; problem-solving and decision-making skills; and interpersonal. Once they have developed a common, the group becomes a team when they hold themselves accountable for the outcome.An organizational culture based on trust is a requirement for the long-term viability of virtual teams; so the new mental model has to be "Employees can be trusted." According to Charles Handy, "Virtuality requires trust to make it work: technology on its own is not enough." If the trust issue is not addressed in the traditional or non-virtual workplace, it is likely to be even more of a problem in a virtual environment such as medical coding, billing and remote medical coding labs (learn about PDN's remote coding labs in the Chicago area).
Strategies for Managing Virtual Healthcare Staffing and Teams
The four stages of team development (namely forming, storming, norming, and performing), provide the four categories for strategies to build and manage virtual healthcare staffing teams that are so necessary for current medical recording and billing requirements:
Forming:
- Execute team basics well. This is very important in a virtual environment (i.e., hold initial face-to-face meeting with an agenda, purpose/goals/mission statement of team, and well-defined roles and responsibilities for team members)
- Establish a clear code of conduct or set of norms for behavior, a mutually agreed upon project schedule, procedures for periodic assessment and methods to keep confidential data secure
- Use visuals in communications
- Recognize that most communication is non-verbal; so watch tone and body language
- Organize and plan work to increase efficiency – operational; routine; collaborative; filler
- Provide time for team-building exercises
- Be cognizant of more room for misunderstandings based on different idioms/expressions even within the same language
Storming:
- Facilitate meeting well so all can give input, get feedback and debrief with process check and recap of decision log and action items
- Have periodic face-to-face (FTF) meetings to resolve conflicts and maintain team cohesiveness
- Allow for different needs of high and low context communicators. Low contexters want to "get right down to business," but high contexters want some informal time to "get to know" team members to work together more effectively.
Norming:
- Keep everyone informed and encourage others to keep everyone informed
- Recognize and reward performance – individual recognition is often done privately via email or telephone call or at times through public praise; team recognition is often done in person or through voice/video conference, so all can hear it at the same time.
Performing:
- Make progress toward goals visible
- Continue to challenge, encourage and coach
- Evaluate team members
- Capture lessons learned in ‘after action review' to exchange best practices with other teams
Contact PDN in Chicago – The Experts in Managing a Mobile Healthcare Workforce
These are a few tips on how to manage your company's virtual team members. Whether your healthcare organization is in the process of building virtual healthcare staffing services or you need the services of a professional, outside company with certified healthcare staffers, remember that virtual staffing will be more commonplace, particularly as the healthcare industry manages the transition to complete electronic healthcare records, documentation and billing information. PDN operates two, fully staffed remote coding labs to assist healthcare providers of all sizes get control over their documentation, data storage retrieval and manipulation requirements, and billing for insurance and government providers.
Virtual Healthcare Staffing