Every employee in your clinic brings something valuable to the table, but not every job position is vital to running a clinic. Janitors, for example, while important for the sanitation and aesthetic maintenance they provide, aren’t the first thing you think of when you think about health clinics. When you really boil it all down to the core DNA of a rural health clinic, three jobs really stand out:

The Doctor

The doctor: provider of medical knowledge and assistance, the reason for which a rural health clinic exists. Lifeblood of the clinic itself. A doctor’s role within a clinic can be specialized or multipurpose, depending on the size of the clinic itself and physicians available. Doctors are the people patients pay to see, and are expected to know how to assess their condition of health, and, if necessary, determine which course of action to take in the event of some medical malady that requires treatment. Doctors save lives or preserve and improve quality of life, an immeasurably valuable commodity.

Receptionist

Though the doctor is the reason why a patient shows up in the first place, receptionists are the cause for their showing up a second time. Receptionists are the ones who greet customers at the door, answer phone calls, schedule appointments, and walk patients through the process of their being checked in and out. Without receptionists, there would be no return visits. As a rural health clinic, repeat customers are vital to your success. Just as your doctor(s) is the lifeblood of your rural health clinic, your receptionist is the face of your clinic, what people recognize and often associate with the quality of the clinic itself.

Office Manager

An office manager serves as the backbone of the clinic, the person who keeps everything running from the background. An office manager’s work can be felt in every corner of the clinic– even if the patient doesn’t know it. Nobody wants to work for free, and office managers are the ones who keep your valued employees on the payroll, ensuring that they get paid on time and for the right amount. They are also responsible for the screening of potential hires, and for keeping your staff well-maintained. Office managers keep the business part of your rural health clinic running smoothly, so the rest of it– keeping your patients happy and healthy– can run smoothly, too. The life of an office manager can get fairly hectic when you factor in all their necessary duties, so it would be a wise to outsource a small part of their duties to a medical billing service, so that the rest of your clinic can run at maximum efficiency.