🔒Former gymnast’s path to founding $16M (and growing) virtual medical assistants business had twists and turns

When Beth Lachance was a student at Bristol Eastern High School, she was a nationally ranked gymnast who already knew what she wanted to do with her life.

“I knew early on I wanted to be a nurse,” she said recently.

Lachance (nee Raboin) is pretty good at achieving her goals. In high school, she completed a certified nursing assistant program while also competing in gymnastics at a high level. She placed second in bars and floor exercise and third in the all-around competition at the 1992 Carolina International Invitational as a member of the Cheshire Acrobatic Training School club team.

After high school, she had her pick of Division I collegiate programs. She accepted a full scholarship from the University of Florida because she “loved the coach,” Judi Markell, and could pursue her nursing education.

Life, though, is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.

After tearing her anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) on two separate occasions — including initially, three months into her freshman year — she retired from gymnastics during her junior year following the 1996 season.

She also had to pivot away from nursing school, because clinical hours were held at the same time as gymnastics practice. Instead, she pursued and earned a bachelor’s degree in community and school health, with the goal of eventually returning to college for a nursing degree.

That didn’t happen, which leads to a question: How does a former collegiate gymnast with a community and school health degree end up founding Global Medical Virtual Assistants (GMVA), a West Hartford-based virtual staffing company with global operations and annual revenues now around $16 million?

“Well, you know, it’s a curvy road,” Lachance, now 49, said.

Remote staffing

If you’re unfamiliar with GMVA, you probably don’t manage a medical practice.

Founded in 2019 and now headquartered at 65 LaSalle Road in the heart of West Hartford Center, GMVA provides remote staffing options for medical practices, offering virtual medical receptionists, medical administrative assistants and medical specialists.

“Not that long ago, virtual assistants (VAs) were being widely used in a lot of different industries, but not in the medical industry,” Lachance said.

Even five years ago, before the pandemic, medical practices were struggling with staffing, she said.

“Insurance is paying less to physicians for their time with patients and for procedures, so profit margins are shrinking,” she said, adding that doctors are seeing significantly more patients each day to earn the same revenue.

“They’re not able to scale and add more staff members,” she said.

The result is massive burnout, Lachance said, because the staff are doing “a tremendous amount of not only direct patient care, but all the administrative work around that, and there’s quite a bit of administrative work.”

That’s where GMVA fits in, offering remote help with new patient intakes, checking patients in and out, scheduling appointments and verifying insurance coverage.

GMVA now has more than 900 employees working remotely for healthcare facilities and medical practices in 30 states. All remote workers are based in the Philippines.

In the room

Lachance’s “curvy road” started after college. She returned to Connecticut and landed a job selling an injectable fertility drug.

She took to pharmaceutical sales right away. “You know, there’s nothing like being 22 years old and instantly making a lot of money!” she said.

The job introduced her to “a lot of really smart people,” while also letting her spend time in doctors’ offices and hospitals, enabling her to “be in medicine in some way,” she said.

That wasn’t enough. “I realized I still wanted to be in the operating room, and the other way to get there is through surgical devices.”

Lachance, who was listed as 4-foot-11 by the University of Florida, said the problem with breaking into surgical device sales was that the field was dominated by men. “I had to battle my way in,” she said.

She succeeded, being hired by a former Florida alum. “He knew the incredible hard work that goes into being a gymnast,” she said.

Lachance said she did really well, even winning some awards, and eventually found her way into those operating rooms.

“It wasn’t hands-on in the operating room, on the operating table, on patients, but I was in the room … guiding surgeons on how to implant the device that I was selling,” she said.

Hockey stick growth

While selling surgical devices, Lachance also was flipping houses as a hobby. She had gotten married (she’s now divorced), and her then-husband, Bob Lachance, enjoyed the process while she handled the project management responsibilities.

“It was just a fun side project, I never really wanted to do that full time,” she said.

Her ex-husband also was a partner in a virtual assistant company for real estate entrepreneurs who needed extra administrative help. That partnership ended suddenly, though, so Lachance immediately quit her sales job.

“We flew to the Philippines and we … established a new business,” she said.

They chose the Philippines because the cost of living is much lower, the main language is English, and the southeast Asian country has a large population of “really smart people that have their bachelor’s degrees,” Lachance said.

She left her then-husband's company about six months later, because her heart was still in the medical field. But her experience with providing virtual assistants for real estate led her to believe she could do the same thing for medical practices.

So, she started GMVA and hired and trained her first two medical virtual assistants.

GMVA provides three weeks of training, but not everyone passes. All virtual assistants must have a degree in nursing or a related field so they have a grounding in medical jargon, she said.

Her first client was the Center for Advanced Reproductive Services, which had been a long-term customer for the injectable fertility drug she once sold. Lachance credited Paul Verrastro, the former CEO of the Center for Advanced Reproductive Services in Farmington and current senior vice president of operations and risk at First Fertility, for agreeing to serve as the pilot program for her new business. 

"That was our proof of concept before I struck out across the United States to bring in additional practices," she said.

Finding other clients was not so easy. This was 2019, before the pandemic struck in March 2020. Before then, medical practices were skeptical of virtual assistants.

Then the pandemic hit, “and suddenly everybody realized … this is not only possible, it works really well,” she said. “And so that just made a true hockey stick for growth for my company.”

In its first year, GMVA had just over $46,000 in revenue; this year, it expects more than $16 million, and the projection for the next 12 months is close to $19 million, Lachance said.

GMVA currently has 918 remote employees working for medical offices and facilities, and new orders from clients for 120 more VAs. In an average month, the company trains about 60 new VAs.

“In another two years, we’ll probably be over 2,500 VAs,” she said.

That’s remarkable, because there is a 13-hour time difference between Connecticut and the Philippines, which means the remote work is done overnight.

GMVA provides its virtual assistants software and a private network to ensure the security of patient information. All workers also are Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) certified.

While GMVA’s West Hartford office is home to the company’s C-suite executives, Lachance does travel four times a year to the Philippines and has supervisory staff there as well.

The company also holds a lavish annual gala for its Philippines’ staff. “It’s really a celebration of our VAs, because they work so hard to provide great patient care,” she said.

Asked whether she ever wonders how she got to this point, Lachance laughs.

“At least once a week,” she said. “I’ve been so incredibly fortunate.”

Still, she doesn’t take all the credit.

“This is not something I did myself,” she said. “It would not be possible without an incredible leadership team in the Philippines. They blow me away.”

NOTE: This article has been updated to correct the name of Beth Lachance's ex-husband and to correct the role played by Paul Verrastro of the Center for Advanced Reproductive Services.