By Mari-Len De Guzman
When a medical clinic relocates or opens its doors for the first time, the administrative weight behind the scenes can be extremely overwhelming, not only for the physician but also for the MOA. But clinics across Chilliwack, Hope and Agassiz are recognizing they don’t have to do it alone.
This past year, Chilliwack Division’s In-Practice Support (IPS) team stepped up its focus on office transitions, providing essential back-office MOA support to help providers relocate and launch new clinics seamlessly.
For Aarya Gautam, the newly hired MOA helping Dr. Jason Dressler transition his practice from Agassiz to Good Cure Medical Clinic in Chilliwack, starting from scratch meant staring at volumes of paperwork and navigating new EMR systems with little training.
“I had a big workload, and I was very stressed out. But ever since the Division came in and helped me out, my workload has reduced a lot,” Gautam recalled. “They have not just taught me how to run a clinic, but they’ve also taught me easy hacks as an MOA that I can do.”
Recognizing that a smooth-running front office is vital to physician retention and patient care, Chilliwack Division’s IPS team expanded its mandate this year to provide targeted, hands-on assistance during critical office transitions.
Faced with widespread MOA staffing constraints, the IPS team innovated by pivoting to a flexible back-office support model, taking on essential administrative tasks, managing onboarding workflows, and troubleshooting operational setups behind the scenes.
To support Dressler’s clinic transition, the IPS team scheduled a weekly visit to the clinic to help Gautam tackle paperwork, streamline EMR data entry, and offer expert mentorship, effectively cutting down the MOA’s workload.
“It’s very helpful the way the Division has established the IPS team, because it just reduces a lot of work for new MOAs or new clinics,” noted Gautam. Experiencing first-hand the support the Division can provide to clinics, she feels more confident now that “I have someone to fall back on.”
Leaving legacy systems behind
While some clinic transitions require building systems from the ground up, others involve untangling years of legacy data. That was the challenge facing Azmindia Melgar, the MOA at Edwards Crossing Medical in Chilliwack, when the clinic’s physicians transitioned away from Viva Care to establish their own practice.
While they obtained a direct copy of their EMR database from their previous location, they found it cluttered with duplicate files and obsolete forms.
“As an MOA, we have a lot on our plates already; to go in and start taking things out [of the system] is a tedious task that requires extra time, and we just don’t have that,” Melgar explained. Between answering phones and greeting patients, deep administrative work during the day is an impossible task.
The IPS team stepped in to tackle the heavy lifting, using an Excel sheet to systematically track and help clean up the cluttered database, and removing obsolete 2013-era documents.
The impact of this back-office cleanup became quickly apparent.
“The doctors are noticing that this is faster, this is so much better, and makes more sense, without the extra stuff that they don’t need,” Melgar shared.
This year’s success also brought valuable lessons about capacity. High demand and staffing constraints temporarily limited frontline MOA relief, but the team’s pivot to behind-the-scenes, back-office support proved to be a highly effective, flexible solution.
Looking ahead, the Division plans to expand the IPS team to stabilize and expand capacity to better meet community demand for both frontline coverage and specialized administrative support.
Maintaining meaningful provider supports to help physicians thrive in their practices is a key pillar of Chilliwack Division’s strategic priorities.