This article is based on a webinar hosted by Dr. Chad Fleming, OD, primary care optometrist, dry eye specialist, co-host of the Optometry Success podcast. Dr. Fleming has been practicing for over 20 years and leads a five-location group in the Wichita, Kansas area.
If you run a healthcare practice, you already know the math doesn’t always work in your favor. Costs keep climbing. Insurance reimbursements stay flat. And somewhere in the middle of all that, you’re trying to find, hire, and keep good people, which has never been harder.
In a recent webinar, Dr. Chad Fleming shared one of the most impactful operational changes his practice has made over the past six years: integrating three remote workers into their workflow through Teem. His group has five locations, ten doctors, and roughly 46 employees, and the insights he shared apply to any healthcare practice managing the pressures of modern HR.
This article captures the key points from that conversation.
The Real Cost of In-House Staffing
Most practice owners think about staff costs in terms of salary and benefits. But as Dr. Fleming points out, the real number is much bigger. When you lose a team member, and today, turnover happens faster than it ever did, you absorb a cascade of costs:
- The time managers spend recruiting and screening candidates
- Onboarding paperwork, training, and compliance setup
- Downtime and reduced efficiency during the transition
- The cultural disruption that follows when a team is in flux
“We hired someone who gave us great early feedback, then resigned within a few months because it wasn’t a good fit,” Dr. Fleming shared. “That pattern is more common now. And every time it happens, your managers are pulled away from their core work to start the hiring cycle all over again.”
Rising wages, payroll taxes, and the administrative burden of managing a growing team compound the problem. For practices trying to stay under the 50-employee threshold, which triggers additional regulatory requirements, every hire carries strategic weight.
What If You Could Save 50% on Select Roles?
That’s not a hypothetical. It’s what Dr. Fleming’s practice has consistently found.
When working with a remote worker partner like Teem, practices pay roughly half what they’d pay for an equivalent in-house employee. The remote workers aren’t on the practice’s payroll, you pay Teem a flat rate, and they handle all HR, compliance, and management overhead on their end.
To put real numbers to it: a one- or two-doctor practice generating $1.6 million in revenue could save roughly $100,000 in personnel costs annually by placing remote workers in select roles. For a practice operating at a thin margin or a small loss, that’s the difference between losing $12,000 and generating $100,000 in net income, and those are real numbers from practices in the industry, not hypotheticals.
That’s not a rounding error. That’s the practice becoming viable.
What Can a Remote Worker Actually Do in a Healthcare Practice?
This is where most skepticism lives, and where Dr. Fleming’s experience is most instructive.
Phone Management Two of Dr. Fleming’s remote workers are based in Brazil and serve as the first line for incoming calls. They schedule appointments, manage text messages, help patients navigate insurance questions, and route calls appropriately. Patients calling the Wichita office don’t know the difference. As Dr. Fleming put it: “I have in-office staff with stronger accents than our remote workers.”
This setup also allows for extended availability, Saturday coverage, extended hours, without overtime concerns.
Insurance Verification Dr. Fleming’s practice does about 70% medical billing. Remote workers handle the more complex insurance verifications, especially on the medical side, freeing up the in-office billing team for higher-level work.
Claims and Billing Support With proper training, remote workers can submit claims and assist with revenue cycle management. They work directly in the EMR, and everything operates within HIPAA-compliant, fully secure systems.
Scribing Remote workers can also serve as scribes, joining the exam room via video and documenting directly in the EMR. Dr. Fleming noted this has had more nuances than phone coverage, but it serves a real purpose in the right situations.
The common thread: with proper training, remote workers can handle most administrative and support functions reliably, and without the interpersonal friction that sometimes comes with in-office staff. “We have had zero gossip, zero drama with our remote workers,” Dr. Fleming noted.
The Objection That Comes Up Every Time
Whenever Dr. Fleming raises this topic with colleagues, he hears the same response: “That won’t work for us.”
His challenge to that: how do you know, if you haven’t tried?
“Practice owners will spend thousands of dollars on billboards and Google ads with a low return, but they won’t take a structured, low-risk pilot on a staffing model that’s already working for practices like theirs,” he said.
The first three to four months will require adjustment, building new workflows, establishing communication routines, getting the remote worker integrated into your systems. But by month four or five, it tends to run smoothly. Dr. Fleming’s longest-tenured remote worker has been with his practice for over two years. The consistency he sees from them is on par with his in-office team.
How the Process Works with Teem
One of the reasons Dr. Fleming works specifically with Teem is that we’ve removed nearly all the friction from the practice’s side. Here’s how it works:
- Discovery call. Teem meets with you to understand your practice, your needs, and what kind of person would be a good fit, they can even help identify which roles are best suited for a remote hire.
- Custom sourcing. Teem finds candidates based on your criteria. Need someone with a neutral accent for phone work? You tell them. They build a shortlist of four people.
- Interview hour. You or your manager spend about an hour doing four 15-minute interviews. You choose who fits. If none do, Teem goes back and sources four more.
- Seamless onboarding. Teem handles all HR and compliance paperwork. The remote worker is technically a Teem employee, so payroll, benefits, and HR management stay entirely off your plate.
- Ongoing support. If something isn’t working, you contact Teem. They handle the transition and find a replacement. When one of Dr. Fleming’s assistants wasn’t working out at 90 days, one call to Teem resulted in four new candidates ready to interview. Beyond placement, Teem also provides ongoing resources to help remote workers perform at a high level, including Teem University, a training platform built for healthcare practices, and a Performance Tracker to help you monitor and manage your remote worker’s daily activities.
The Bigger Picture
Healthcare margins are under pressure that isn’t going away. Reimbursements aren’t keeping pace with costs. Wages for in-office staff are rising. The administrative burden of managing people keeps growing.
Remote workers aren’t a replacement for your in-office team. They’re a strategic complement, a way to deploy your budget more efficiently, extend your coverage, and give your managers more bandwidth to lead rather than constantly fill open chairs.
Dr. Fleming’s practice uses remote workers in three specific roles. Those three positions generate meaningful monthly savings that go back into compensating in-office staff more competitively.
As he put it, borrowing from John Maxwell: fail forward. The only way to find out if it works for your practice is to try it.
Dr. Chad Fleming is a primary care optometrist specializing in dry eye treatment, with a Doctorate of Optometry (summa cum laude) from Northeastern State University. He practices in the Wichita, Kansas area, serves in leadership roles within the American Optometric Association, and co-hosts the Optometry Success podcast.
Want to explore whether remote workers are a fit for your practice? Schedule a discovery call with Teem.
