Training New Employees

One of the most difficult tasks in the medical office is training new employees. Even when an employee comes to you with lots of experience, it does not mean that the new employee will be able or willing to do things the way you want them done. We find that some of the people we have hired who come to us with experience tend to do things the way they learned in a previous office. That is not always a good thing.

Some new employees learn much quicker than others. When we hire a new person, we try to establish what their strong and weak points are as soon as possible. We find some people are natural at making and answering phone calls and some hate talking on the phone and do not do as good a job. Sometimes when we hire a person for a job we find that they are better suited for a different one than what we intended. We try to work around the employees strong points as long as it works for us. But if we hire someone for a specific job and they are no good at it we find it best to let them go before we waste any extra time in training. If we can use them in another position that they are good at, that is great but if it isn't working, we let them go.

Training a new worker is a huge time consuming job which keeps others from getting their own work completed. If you don't watch all the work they do to make sure it is being done the way you want it done you may find yourself redoing it. This can take longer than it would have taken to do it yourself. Generally speaking we find it takes months to a year before a worker is trained well enough to stop checking their work.

When first starting to train a new employee it is crucial that you check everything they do. As the new employee gets more experience we've learned to spot check the areas we feel were potential problem areas for them. With all the things there are to learn in the medical billing field it takes time to develop a great employee. Once we have a great employee we do everything we can to keep them happy so they stay on. It's so much easier to keep a great happy worker than it is to train a new one.