AADOM DISTINCTIONcast – Understanding the Need for Virtual Assistants
Explore how virtual assistants can transform dental office operations by alleviating common front office challenges, enhancing workflow efficiency, and improving patient satisfaction. This course provides actionable insights into identifying the right tasks to delegate, ensuring seamless implementation, and maximizing the benefits of virtual team members for your practice.
Learning Objectives:
- Understand the Role and Benefits of Virtual Assistants – Identify common pain points in dental office workflows and recognize how virtual assistants can improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance patient experiences
- Assess Readiness for Integrating Virtual Support – Evaluate the indicators of readiness for virtual assistants, define tasks suitable for delegation, and determine the systems and processes necessary for a successful integration
- Develop Strategies for Onboarding and Measuring Success – Gain insights into creating effective onboarding processes, building trust and communication with virtual assistants, and measuring the success of their impact on practice operations
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Read the Transcript Now!
Rebecca: Thank you. It’s such a pleasure to be here with you.
Savanah: So, as a distinction holder, how has holding a distinction propelled your career within the dental industry?
Rebecca: Honestly, it’s having so many wonderful, stellar leaders in this industry that have become such great resources, friends and colleagues to reach out to when you literally feel like you have nowhere to go or no one to reach out to — to support you with ideas, with resources, with just honestly a shoulder to cry on sometimes when you just need that.
And I’m really appreciative for AADOM and all that it offers for those that decide to join. I absolutely love being the vice president of our local DPLN here in Colorado and the opportunity that gives me to share my same passion with those that are just learning about AADOM, and all of the benefits that it’s brought to me personally for them to take back and give back to their offices.
Savanah: That’s awesome, Rebecca. I love that you talked about the support aspect of being a part of AADOM and having peers to lean on. And speaking of support, it brings us to your presentation today.
Dental managers and teams needing support, but they might not be able to have a physical person to support them. So, I’m super excited to have you present today about virtual assistants.
Rebecca: Thank you. I’m super passionate and look forward to sharing some of this knowledge with our listeners today. So, thank you for this opportunity.
So, I’m here to talk about, like Savanah said, navigating the processes of learning about virtual assistants. How to know if you’re ready for one and how to find the right company to work with and that onboarding and training process. So, thank you so much for allowing me to be here with you today.
How I Came to Discover the Need for Virtual Assistants
I learned about virtual assistants in my own opportunity in a previous practice that I worked in, where we were really struggling with trying to figure out what we were supposed to do with a shortage of staff. And in an area where we struggled to just find really stellar employees who had the skills and background that we needed for the different positions in our office.
So, this is what started my travels down the virtual assistant avenue. And I’m really excited for the opportunity to share it with you today.
As you know, a lot of front offices are really struggling with that revenue stream. There’s so many things that we all have to do at that front desk that it feels sometimes like an endless list of things to do—answer the phones and schedule and claims, you’ve got to verify that insurance and billing, and sometimes that all those claims come back and they’ve been denied and we have to resend them in.
There’s so many things, but there is a hidden revenue stream. And I’m going to tell you today how to unlock it and bring more productivity and efficiency to your dental practice.
Benefits of Having a Virtual Assistant
The benefits of working with a virtual assistant, and if you’re not aware of necessarily what a virtual assistant is—they help your dental practice to bring more cost effective and efficient solutions for managing administrative tasks within your dental practice.
They are remote, and they are offshore, meaning that they’re not within the United States. Some of this is—some people get a little nervous about working with virtual assistants.
But what I loved about our working with these virtual assistants within our dental practice was they came with such a work ethic that I just was very surprised at their determination to learn and to do their very, very best within our dental practice.
There’s so many things that these virtual assistants can do and are willing to do for your dental practice. And the whole goal of working with them is to have them take over some of those administrative tasks within your practice and allow the team that’s in office to do the things that they need to, to give your patients the experience that we want them to have within our practice.
It has them going back to their friends and family and saying, “You need to come to the dentist that I see. It was such a great experience.”
Some of those tasks that we can give them are insurance verifications. Very time consuming. Sometimes we sit on hold with those insurance companies for a really long time. And that’s something that our virtual assistants can do to help support our practices.
They can take those breakdowns and insurance forms and such, and they can enter them into your PMS system, allowing you the time to focus on the patients. When they come in to check in and be able to present those treatment plans effectively to your patients.
A lot of these things, like I said, are time consuming and they allow the office to be able to focus on exceptional patient care.
When they’re given these types of tasks, they’re able to focus on enhancing the efficiency and the workflow of your practice.
Another area when we were looking at bringing in our own virtual assistant team was we really needed help with our phones.
They went off all day long and it felt like our front office team felt very torn between answering the phones and helping the patients that were standing directly in front of them.
So, answering the phones, helping to schedule, and helping us confirm our patients was extremely helpful for us and allowed that efficiency and workflow to be so much better for our practice.
And again, like I mentioned, of course, it helps us to deliver exceptional patient care when they aren’t having to choose between the phone and the patient standing directly in front of them.
Insurance eligibility and breakdowns—we touched on that as well. They’re able to support us. They also can support us when our office may not be open. If your office is open like Monday through Thursday, your virtual team can support you on Fridays, allowing you to complete those insurance breakdowns and eligibilities, confirming patients, and being able to fill your schedule should a hole open on Friday with the cancellation, keeping your schedules full and ready Monday mornings.
The biggest thing, honestly, that we took away from hiring virtual assistants was reducing that team burnout. Sometimes what happens when someone happens to leave our practice or need to move on is those responsibilities get put on place with somebody else in our practice versus hiring someone to replace them.
Or we struggled in that process of hiring to find someone to take their place. And so those responsibilities get put on someone who is a stellar employee in the practice or the office manager, and it starts to become very overwhelming.
Virtual assistants are never meant to replace someone in the practice, but to enhance their experience in the practice by being able to offload some of those administrative tasks can be handled by someone in the back office—or in this case, offshore—to allow them the opportunity to get tasks done and allow the people that are in the office to give those patients the experience we hope that they have while they’re in the practice.
Knowing When to Get a Virtual Dental Office Assistant
Some of you may be asking, “How do I know if I’m ready to take that step and outsource to a virtual assistant?
The greatest example I have, of course, is does your team spend more time on paperwork than patient care? If you find that you’re at the end of the day, still trying to finish up on paperwork items, than taking care of the patients in need, it might be time to consider working with a virtual assistant.
If your efforts to attract new patients seems to be scattered or ineffective, another reason to consider working with a virtual assistant.
The claims process, or your AR in your office, might seem to get a little out of control. The time it takes us to file claims, do the attachments, do the narratives, and do all the things that we need to—to make sure our claims are being filed effectively and efficiently so that they don’t get denied—can sometimes be consuming and overwhelming depending on the size of our practice.
So, this is another really great example of where our virtual assistants can help us. And following up on denied claims or claims that seem to be getting delayed with insurance companies is another great step in where our virtual assistants can reach out to insurance companies, sit on hold, one of our favorite things ever, and speak to the insurance companies to find out what the holdup is and what we need to do to push that insurance plan through so it can get paid and reduce our extended AR in our practice.
Hiring and training our staff over and over if you have a recurring or revolving door with staff in your practice or in your area is another fantastic way to view a virtual assistant. Virtual assistants tend to stay where they are. They’re so grateful for the job, and they’re so excited for a job within the United States, which tends to pay them better than within their own country.
With this in mind, they are so excited to have a full-time job working for a U. S. company and having the ability to learn and grow with a company in the United States. They don’t require the same hourly rate that we do in the United States, which allows them to make the money that they need and would like to support their families, which allows our dental practices to reduce our overhead salary costs by working with a virtual assistant team.
If you’re trying to expand your dental practice, or if you’re a startup dental practice and needing support but you just can’t quite get there—you’re just too busy, you’re pushing too much paperwork and things seem to be a little chaotic in the practice—might be another reason to consider working with a virtual assistant to grow your practice and consider having that support in what I like to call my secret weapon in the back office, which is your virtual assistant who can help take on a lot of those administrative tasks, opening you up to the opportunity to grow and expand the growth of your practice.
How to Start with a Virtual Assistant
How do we get started?
This is the biggest task I think lots of people are wondering. How do we even know what to do and how to get started?
I know I felt this way when I was getting started with my dental practice and we decided to think outside the box a little bit with these virtual assistants.
The first step to hiring these virtual assistants is to at first identify your needs.
What are they going to do for you and how are they going to do it for you? These are the important things to discuss one with your doctor, but also with your entire front desk team. Ask them what are the top three things that you could take off of your plate right now? What would those three top three things be?
Take this list and have a discussion as a front desk team to see how many virtual assistants could help support your dental practice.
Finding the right company. This is absolutely key. And we’ll discuss this a little further in our presentation today. But finding that right company is absolutely the most important thing you can do.
I’ve worked with several different companies over the years with virtual assistants, and there are quite a few options out there. It’s finding what best suits you and your practice, but I’m always open to suggesting recommendations if you’re open to it.
Interviewing and selecting. One of the most important things I believe when you’re looking for a virtual assistant is making sure that that virtual assistant is going to fit your culture and your mission statement for your practice.
When you’re working with a virtual assistant company, they should be pretty good at asking you some good questions about your office, your team, and what your goals are so that they can match you with a virtual assistant who, one: is only working for you and not other companies at the same time. So, they get to focus on what your processes and protocols are to excel and work with you as a team for your dental practice.
Questions That Will Help You Identify Your Needs
Here are some of the top five questions to identify the needs of your practice.
What tasks do you want them to perform? These are important because we want to make sure that they are tasks they can do, obviously remotely, which honestly, within our practice, where we hired our virtual assistants, and I don’t recommend this for everyone—we didn’t have anyone at our front desks and all of our locations. We had multiple locations.
It worked for us, but we needed them to be able to perform everything other than doing treatment presentations.
So, make a list: What tasks do you want them to be able to perform?
What days and hours do you need them to work for you? Remembering that they can work some odd hours, maybe hours that you’re not in the office—Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays. They are available and able to work for you on days and times that may be ways to expand the hours of your practice availability, whereas your team that’s in the office may not be able to.
What skills or qualifications would you require? Keeping in mind that there may be platforms that you use within your practice, they will need to know how to use, understand, and be able to use the analytics that come from those platforms to support the way that you communicate and work with your patients and your team.
What software and tools do you use?
And what’s your budget and your timeline? Some virtual assistant companies have a great way of implementing those virtual assistants. Some offer some training, some don’t. And that’s something to keep in mind. It may be worth waiting on that timeline to have them start if they offer a little bit of training before they start within your practice.
Is Your Dental Practice Well-Suited to Have a Virtual Assistant?
Here’s some signs that help you indicate whether your practice is well suited to start working with virtual assistants.
We’re all balancing so many balls—or in this case oranges—in the air in our practices that help us to know whether it’s time to offer some support and to avoid burnout with our staff at the front desk.
Here’s some really great ones. So many things for us to consider.
One of the things we did with our VAs within our practice before was, we realized we had a lot of missed appointments. People canceling last minute. And for us, that was creating a lot of chaos on the day of appointments.
With our virtual assistants, we set up a process and a procedure that we wanted them to go through that would help us to avoid missed appointments, which then helped us to reduce our open chair time by 80 percent within our practice. If this is something you’re struggling with, this may be something that your virtual assistants can help you do.
Another thing that we implemented with our virtual assistants was working our recare lists and our outstanding treatment lists. These are things we wish we all had more time to work on in our practice, but we never seem to have time to do. This is a wonderful thing that our virtual assistants are very, very good at doing. They can reach out to our patients. They can reach out to see if they’re due for recare.
They can reach out and say, “Hey, I talked with Dr. Smith and we were talking about your treatment plan that we presented to you nine months ago. We haven’t seen you back for recare. We’d love to get you back in. Let’s do a re-evaluation on that tooth in the upper left that needed a crown. Is it bothering you?”
“Yeah, it’s still kind of bothering me.”
“Great, let’s get you back in. Let’s do a re-evaluation and see what’s going on. We’ll get your teeth cleaned, and let’s move forward from there. Dr. Smith really cares about you and your oral health.”
Any way we can reach out, do an extended hand. It was a huge impact and factor with our virtual assistants and how they doubled our production in all of our locations that first year they started working with us. It was just made a huge impact on all three of our practices.
High call volume. How many times would you say that phone keeps ringing and I’m ready to yank it out of the wall right about now.
The day that our virtual assistants took over the phones and they stopped ringing in the office—it was one of the most joyous days, for me at least, and our staff loved it. It brought such a peace and calm to the practice that even our patients noticed it when they came into the office.
We talked about after hours phone support, being able to help take calls from patients who maybe they can’t call you back until after the office is closed. How nice would that be to be able to offer that service to your patients, letting them know that the office phones are open, you know, till 7 or 8 o’clock at night for them to call, confirm, make appointments, and so on.
So, you can keep your production high and rolling and keeping your patients happy when they are unable to answer or return calls to the office. So many wonderful things that we can use our virtual assistants for to help with our practice growth.
Finding the Right Outsourcing Company
Like I talked about a little bit earlier, this is really important, and honestly, choosing the right one is a really significant decision that can truly impact your business efficiency and success.
You want to find a virtual assistant company that’s very transparent and they’re very accountable. This is a big step and a big change for your practice and it can be one of the greatest decisions that you make.
Having communication and a good cultural fit, making sure that there’s good communication not only between you and the company, but also the company communicating with your virtual assistant and you and your communication with the virtual assistant and your office, as you will be communicating quite a bit in those first several months as they’re getting trained and rolling into your practice.
I always like to remind people: virtual assistants are not plug and play. They don’t come to you all set and ready. You do have to still train them to the particulars of your dental practice.
Company reputation and reviews. As you’re considering several that you might interview or talk to, make sure you go back and see if they have a good reputation and see if there’s some reviews that you can read about the company. And they may even have some customers who have willingly stepped up to say that they would share their experience in working with that company. And that would be also a great way to hear of other people’s experiences in working with that company.
Ongoing support and follow up. My experience years ago, when we took on our virtual assistant team was—we got our virtual assistants, and that was it.
It was a little frustrating at first because I had no one to reach out to for support, for questions, to support our virtual assistants, or our practices if we had questions, if we needed help in offering IT support to them, if they needed help in their country, or if we needed help in getting them connected to our dental practice.
Thankfully, our doctors were pretty IT savvy cause I am not, but it was a great way to have them feel supported, our office feels supported. And that will be important to you as you go through this process of onboarding.
Quality assurance and training offered. Like I mentioned before, there are companies that do offer training to those virtual assistants before they start or at least offer suggested training for you as an office for those virtual assistants before they start.
You may have a lot of questions along the way in that process of onboarding them and you want to make sure that you’re working with a company who wants to make sure that you succeed and your virtual assistant succeeds as well.
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Join AADOM now to access the full content and a world of resources. Your next big step is just a click away!
Learn About the Presenter:
Rebecca Herring, MAADOM
Rebecca is a seasoned dental coach with over 25 years of hands-on experience in the dental industry, a journey that began in her youth while accompanying her father, a dentist, on humanitarian trips to Guadalajara. During these early experiences, Rebecca discovered the transformative power of dentistry and the importance of compassionate care. Her dedication to making a difference has only deepened since, and today, she empowers dental teams and professionals to unlock their full potential, ensuring they are in roles that not only fit their skills but fuel their passion.
Rebecca is known for her approachable, down-to-earth coaching style. She understands the complexities of running a dental practice and strives to make each team member feel valued, supported, and heard. Her genuine care for others shines through in her work, whether she’s helping a practice streamline workflows, develop leadership skills, or enhance patient care. With expertise in leadership development, standard operating procedures, and team dynamics, Rebecca helps dental offices achieve operational efficiency while creating a positive and motivated workplace culture.
Rebecca believes that at the heart of every successful practice is a unified, empowered team. By fostering open communication and trust, she creates an environment where dental professionals can thrive. Her personalized coaching approach focuses on strengthening team relationships, improving workflows, and reducing errors, all of which lead to an exceptional patient experience and a stronger, more productive practice.
As Vice President of the Denver DPLN network, sponsored by AADOM, Rebecca is at the forefront of dental office management. Her commitment to professional development is reflected in her achievements as a lifetime member of the American Academy of Dental Office Management (AADOM), where she earned her Fellowship in 2023, her Mastership in 2024, and is on track to receive the prestigious Diplomate designation in 2025.
Her deep understanding of dental practice management is further enriched by her active involvement with leading industry organizations such as Women in DSO, Dental Entrepreneur Women (DeW), and the Academy of Dental Management Consultants (ADMC). These affiliations keep her well-connected with the latest industry trends and best practices, ensuring her coaching clients benefit from cutting-edge insights.
Rebecca’s approachability and wealth of knowledge extend to her role as co-host of the “Dental Decoders Podcast,” where she brings her down-to-earth wisdom and practical solutions to listeners. In the podcast, she and her guests—industry leaders, coaches, and mentors—decode the challenges of dental practice management and provide actionable strategies to help teams and practice owners overcome obstacles and thrive.
One of Rebecca’s key areas of focus is helping practices build their “dream team” through the implementation of virtual assistants. She offers a step-by-step guide on how to leverage offshore support staff to reduce operational costs, enhance productivity, and scale a practice with ease. Her strategic approach helps dental teams stay agile and competitive while improving patient care.
Outside of her coaching practice, Rebecca finds joy in her family and the great outdoors. She and her husband, Chris, enjoy an active lifestyle in Colorado, where they embrace the changing seasons with activities like camping, hiking, paddleboarding, snowboarding, and ice climbing. Together, they raise seven children and are eagerly awaiting the arrival of their second grandchild in 2025. Rebecca’s personal life mirrors the values she brings to her professional world—balance, passion, and a commitment to growth and adventure.
With her vast experience, approachable demeanor, and unwavering dedication to helping others succeed, Rebecca Herring is not just a coach but a trusted partner in transforming dental practices from the inside out.
