When you bring a new therapist into a group practice, your first order of business is getting them up to speed on internal policies, procedures, and administrative necessities. Whether they’re a relative newcomer to the field or a veteran, there’s always a learning curve. Getting that piece of the puzzle right, so that your new hires can provide the kind of care to clients you brought them into the practice for, without getting sidetracked by operational hiccups, comes down to effective onboarding.
Changes in the mental health landscape over the past few years have, as with many aspects of care, shaken up onboarding. What could once be handled ad hoc or in person is now too big of a task for any group practice to manage manually. That’s why virtual clinician onboarding is emerging as a must-need resource for any group practice.
Virtual clinician onboarding is changing the game; or more accurately, the game has changed, and virtual clinician onboarding gives group practices the pieces they need to play. Practices that implement virtual clinician onboarding can overcome a number of the challenges that new ways of pursuing therapy and new patient expectations have introduced to the mental health field.
A demanding new era in mental health
In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, mental health concerns continue to spike. More people than ever have been calling the therapist’s office seeking some guidance and sense of calm. The relative lack of clinicians with respect to this huge wave of demand has meant group practices needing to bring on therapists fast. When therapists arrive in a group practice, they may face, client-for-client, a more taxing work experience than in the past because of a more severe set of concerns coming from clients than what was seen only a few years ago.
Technological shifts have likewise shaken up how group practices conduct business. With the advent of telehealth, it has become more common for therapists to join up with a practice while rarely making an appearance in the office. A changing regulatory landscape means more intricate and confusing billing practices, and distinctions between how billing is handled at insurance-based clinics vs. cash-pay clinics, means more room for mix-ups that can have costly or even legal implications. The list goes on.
What all these simultaneous changes translate into is new therapists having more best practices to learn on day one, while meeting more numerous, more challenging clients, with less real-life face-time to be shown the ropes.
The holes left by manual onboarding
At the moment, you might still be using onboarding techniques honed in an earlier era. Maybe you still send out an old-school onboarding packet via snail-mail, or email a series of attachments, instructional PDFs and the like when a new hire starts. With virtual clinician onboarding, there is none of that.
Even if you haven’t seen the downside of manual onboarding methods, they’re still there. Of course new hires want to have all the boxes checked and do everything correctly, even the administrative stuff. But when it comes to receiving emails or informational packets, people are already overwhelmed with information—we are almost becoming wired to backburner these types of communications. Add to that the fact that you’re dealing with therapists who may be working at multiple clinics with over-full schedules, and you can see how traditional onboarding materials fall off the radar.
When therapists skip onboarding materials, problems can arise. Therapists end up making mistakes they don’t know they’re making. They come into conflict with other staff members over incorrectly collected or entered data. They have to have these mistakes addressed, and feel underappreciated or unfairly put upon because of it. Problems of this kind can trickle down to client care, or trickle up to the group as a whole, leading in the worst case scenario to either attrition of quality therapists or having to spend time and resources handling internal conflict.
Even if your practice hasn’t experienced anything quite so dramatic, such issues may sound at least a little familiar. Virtual clinician onboarding prevents problems like these from materializing.
It’s a simple innovation that is revealing itself as a basic necessity for creating a vibrant and effective hybrid work environment for therapists and clients.
Virtual clinician onboarding: what group practices need today
Virtual clinician onboarding consists of using video content, tailor made by subject matter experts in the mental health space, to get new clinicians up to speed on every critical aspect of working in a new group practice. Before clinicians start, they are furnished with a full suite of streaming video content on topics like billing, in-office and remote working best practices, and intake.
These easy-to-watch, easy-to-digest process walkthroughs meet clinicians where they are. Online video has emerged as an incredibly effective learning and training tool, across disciplines. It’s a medium people expect, interact with intuitively, pay attention to and garner a lot from. It’s convenient, allowing people to watch it, review it, and refer back to it at any time of the day or night. Content prepared in this format allows therapists to quickly absorb must-know best practices with no ambiguity.
The demands on group practices continue to grow in size and scope. In some ways that’s not bad. It means people recognize the value of pursuing therapy rather than going it alone in a tough and confusing world. It means, too, that group practices and the therapists that they employ have an opportunity to help perhaps more people than ever before.
Setting therapists up to do this to the best of their abilities means creating an environment where the operational and administrative tasks therapists have to take care of become second nature and fade into the background, letting them focus on the client. Virtual client onboarding makes this possible for any group practice. It’s a game-changing solution that brings the onboarding process into the present day, to meet the present-day needs of group practices, the therapists they employ, and the clients they help.
