Health care receptionists make a median $19 an hour

A $2-an-hour raise for a full-time receptionist is $4,160 a year before payroll taxes. Software covers the raise only if the saved hours come off your payroll.

Nate Peereboom
Co-founder, JotPsych

Your receptionist has an offer: $2 more an hour at a clinic across town. Do you match the offer? Start with the going rate.

What a raise costs you

Match the offer if you'd rather pay for the raise than hire and train a new receptionist.

Chris King runs Pinnacle Medical Group, a primary care group in Northern Nevada. He said someone making $20 an hour may leave for $2 more. His answer: "I would rather invest additional dollars so that I can give them that $1, $2, $3 raise."

Three desk tasks you can move to software

• Calling each of your patients to confirm the visit.
• Handing out intake packets on clipboards.
• Typing intake answers into your charts.

Write down the paid hours each task takes your front desk in a week, and multiply those hours by your receptionist's hourly pay and by 52 weeks. The result is what the three tasks cost you each year, before payroll taxes.

Your software pays for a raise only if those paid hours come off your payroll: you stop paying overtime, drop a part-time shift, or skip a desk hire. You cover a $2-an-hour raise when the pay for the hours you cut, less what the software costs, reaches $4,160 a year.

Pinnacle moved fax filing to software first. Most outgoing referrals came next. Automating the referrals reduced headcount, King said, so Pinnacle can open clinics without adding support staff at the same rate. Software takes "tasks that really no one wanted to do anyway," he said, and "allows us to reinvest in people."