Medical virtual assistant services

What stays with your in-house staff

A medical VA does administrative work. Anything that needs a clinician, a license or a person in the building stays with your team, and the line goes in writing:

• Clinical judgment, such as whether a symptom needs to be seen, and reading results
• Medical advice, dosing questions and changes to a clinician’s instructions
• Phone triage beyond your written protocol: anything off script goes to a licensed person at once
• Signing or attesting as a provider, including credentialing forms and clinical notes
• In-person work: check-in, payments at the desk and rooming patients

Scope-of-practice rules for some tasks are set by state law and vary. Where the answer is not obvious, check with your health care attorney.

HIPAA compliant virtual assistants, in practice

A VA company that creates, receives, maintains or transmits patient information for you is a business associate. 45 CFR 164.502 lets you give it that access only with satisfactory assurances in a written contract that meets 45 CFR 164.504(e), and requires both of you to make reasonable efforts to limit patient information to the minimum necessary for the task. Here is how that works with us:

• A signed business associate agreement before any login is created. Our HIPAA compliance and BAA page sets out the terms.
• Minimum necessary access, set by role: a scheduling assistant does not need the clinical notes.
• Named, role-based logins in your own systems, one per assistant, as the Security Rule’s unique user identification requirement calls for. No shared accounts, so every action traces to one person.
• No patient information on personal devices: the work stays inside your systems, and nothing is downloaded or saved to a personal phone or computer.
• HIPAA training before go-live, and logins switched off the day an assignment ends, in line with the administrative safeguards.

How to tell whether it is working

Agree the measures before go-live and review them at 30 days. These are numbers to track, not promises; what good looks like depends on your volume and starting point:

• Calls answered, and the share that went to voicemail or were abandoned
• Visits with coverage verified before the patient arrives, using the same checks as our eligibility and benefits verification
• Authorizations submitted and the days each took to a decision, logged the way our prior authorization team logs them
• Inbox age: faxes, portal messages and voicemails older than 24 hours
• Errors found in the supervisor’s daily QA sample

If a number does not move, the SOP, the hours or the task mix changes. Hours can go up or down from one month to the next.

What a medical VA costs next to a local hire

There is no published price for our virtual assistants. We quote after a free scoping call, because the number depends on the hours, the task mix and the systems involved.

To compare, price a local hire at total cost, not salary. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the national median wage at $45,930 a year for medical secretaries and administrative assistants and $38,010 for receptionists (May 2025). In private industry, benefits were 30.0% of employer compensation costs in June 2026, and paid leave was 7.5% of that, which a salary already covers.

Leave paid leave out and divide the wage by 0.775: about $59,300 a year for a medical secretary and $49,000 for a receptionist, before recruiting, training, desk space and cover for absences. Local pay can sit well above or below the national median, so use your own payroll figure and set our quote for the same hours next to it.