High staff turnover isn’t just a staffing issue, it’s a significant financial and operational challenge for medical practices. A recent MGMA report showed turnover rates of 40% for front office staff and over 30% for clinical support roles in 2022. The cost of constantly recruiting, training, and onboarding new hires adds up quickly, not to mention the toll it takes on patient experience and staff morale.
If your practice feels like it’s stuck in a revolving door, you’re not alone. But you can slow it down. Let’s take a look at five common (but fixable) retention mistakes and how you can create a more sustainable team structure.
Overloading Your Clinical Staff with Nonclinical Tasks
When nurses and MAs are spending hours a day on the phone, verifying insurance, chasing prior auths, or scheduling follow-ups, it’s no wonder burnout is so high. That kind of task-switching pulls them away from patient care and can lead to frustration and fatigue.
Solution: Offload nonclinical workflows like telephone triage, appointment scheduling, refill processing, and prior authorizations to a remote team trained in healthcare systems and protocols. This keeps your clinical team focused and more fulfilled in their roles.
Inconsistent Communication Channels
Staff turnover often stems from confusion. “Who handles this?” “Why didn’t I know about that?” If team members don’t have consistent workflows or a clear handoff process, it creates tension and inefficiency.
Solution: Use tools and partners that support structured communication. Whether it’s daily inbox indexing, real-time scheduling, or triage documentation, remote support can provide consistency and clarity across your team.
Relying on the Same People for Everything
Too often, one or two “rock stars” on the team become the go-to for every overflow task. While it might work short-term, over time, it leads to burnout. When those key people leave, it creates major disruption.
Solution: Balance your team by distributing workload more effectively. Outsourcing repetitive or time-consuming processes like chronic care management (CCM), remote patient monitoring (RPM), or insurance verification takes pressure off your core staff and supports long-term retention.
Not Protecting Time for Patient-Facing Work
One of the most frustrating things for medical staff is spending more time on paperwork and phone calls than with patients. When clinical professionals feel disconnected from what drew them to medicine, they’re more likely to leave.
Solution: Let your in-house team focus on high-touch, face-to-face care. Delegate administrative processes like prior auth processing and medication refill requests to experienced remote teams who can handle them efficiently and in compliance with your protocols.
Waiting Too Long to Ask for Help
Many practices wait until turnover becomes a crisis before considering a change. By then, the remaining staff are overburdened, and new hires are harder to keep.
Solution: Be proactive. Evaluate your workflows and staff satisfaction regularly. If your team is struggling to keep up, it may be time to integrate support before burnout pushes more employees out the door.
Let’s Build a Stronger, More Stable Team Together
At 1st Call Practice Solutions, we help medical practices nationwide ease staffing stress by taking essential but time-consuming tasks off your plate. From telephone triage to appointment scheduling, insurance verification to CCM, we offer remote support that helps your practice run smoothly and helps your team stay happy.Ready to reduce turnover and strengthen your team? Book a free 15-minute Discovery Call to learn how we can help.
