Core Practice Virtual Assistant: a VA who runs the diary, recalls and claiming while you stay in the chair

Nobody searches “core practice virtual assistant” because they are curious about software. You search it because the practice runs on that appointment book, and the person confirming the day, working the recalls, chasing the unpaid gap fees and lodging the claims is you, in the ninety seconds between gloving down from one patient and calling the next one through.

Dental is the cruel version of this problem. The clinician and the receptionist are often the same person, the recall list is where six months of revenue quietly lives or dies, and Core Practice will track all of it for you while contacting precisely none of it on its own. A VA does not replace the dentist. It sits in the front-desk seat the practice has never properly had time to fill.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your Core Practice

Mornings start with the book. Before the first patient is through the door, your VA gives the day’s column a pass: anyone still unconfirmed gets an SMS, the bookings that came in online overnight are checked and slotted against the right provider and the right chair, any accidental double-booking is caught now rather than at 9am with two people in the waiting room, and the short-notice gaps are flagged. The point is simple. The dentist walks into the day the schedule says they have, not a surprise.

Then the recalls, which is where most of the money the practice is leaving on the table actually sits. Core Practice knows exactly who is due and overdue for a check-up, because it tracks the recall interval the moment treatment is completed. What it does not do is pick up the phone or send the message. So your VA works the list: pulls the patients due and overdue, contacts them in the order you have set, books them back in, and keeps that churn moving week after week instead of letting a whole cohort drift past their due date and forget you exist. A dental practice that works its recall list properly and one that lets it lapse are two different businesses, and the difference is almost entirely admin labour nobody had spare.

Reminders run alongside that. Your VA keeps the SMS reminder templates short and tuned per appointment type, chases a confirmation once and properly rather than firing off three vague ones, and sets the cadence so patients actually turn up without the front desk re-sending all day. SMS is billed per message, so lean templates are not just tidy, they keep the bill down.

Online bookings get triaged rather than trusted blindly. Availability is kept honest on your booking page so the slots patients can see match the gaps you really have, new bookings are sorted into the correct appointment type and length, and anything that needs a clinical judgement call, the patient who books a routine clean but describes pain in the notes, gets flagged to you instead of quietly auto-confirmed into the wrong slot.

In the afternoon, money. Off the day’s completed treatment, invoices and receipts are raised and sent, the on-the-spot health fund claims your dentists have put through the integrated HICAPS terminal are submitted and reconciled against the invoice, and the gaps and rejections are flagged with the claim detail attached. For the families on the Child Dental Benefits Schedule, your VA checks each child’s CDBS eligibility and remaining cap before the appointment so nobody finds out at the desk that the balance ran out in March, then lodges the Medicare and CDBS claims your providers have billed and chases anything Services Australia bounces. The outstanding patient portions and gap fees get worked on a chasing cadence you approve, so they do not sit unpaid for half a year because no one had time to send the second reminder.

By the time you reach a practice meeting, the production, recall-conversion and outstanding-accounts figures are already pulled out of Core Practice’s reporting and sitting in front of you, so the conversation starts with real numbers rather than a feeling about how the month went.

The honest bit

A few things are worth saying plainly, because a page that pretends the software does everything is no use to you.

Core Practice tracks the recall but it does not contact anyone. The recall list is a list. It will tell you, accurately, who is overdue, and it will sit there doing exactly that until a human works it. Hiring a VA does not switch on an automation you forgot to find; it puts a person on the list who actually rings down it.

HICAPS claiming is terminal-bound at the moment of payment. The integration lets the claim detail flow between Core Practice and the terminal, but the patient’s card is still physically tapped at the machine in the room. Your VA can submit, reconcile and chase the claiming admin, but the chairside tap belongs to whoever is standing at the chair. Anyone promising you a VA who processes terminal claims from Manila is describing something the hardware does not allow.

And the clinical layer is not the VA’s to touch, by design rather than by goodwill. The charting, the treatment notes, the perio records and the imaging sit outside the front-desk role. That is a feature, not a limitation you have to work around, but it does mean the VA cannot, for instance, finalise a clinical note for you. They keep the front desk true; you keep the clinical record.

What stays with you

Dental is a regulated, clinical setting, so the line matters and it is not blurry. Everything that is clinical stays with you and your dentists. Treatment notes, charting, diagnosis, the treatment plan, item-number selection and coding, and any judgement that touches a patient’s care all remain with the clinician. If a patient says something that sounds clinical, a symptom, a reaction, a concern about treatment, it escalates to you under a written rule rather than being handled at the front desk.

The VA’s world is operational: the diary, the recalls, the reminders, the claiming admin and the accounts. Core Practice’s role-based permissions are what enforce this, not a promise in an onboarding email. The VA goes in on a front-desk user that reaches the appointment book, patient contacts, recalls, invoicing, payments and claiming, while the clinical record stays outside that role. Only you or an admin user can change those permissions, so the access the VA holds is exactly the access you granted, and the confidentiality agreement signed on day one sits on top of that as backup, not as the main control.

What it costs and where to start

Core Practice work lands on our admin tier, $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST. Most dental practices run 10-15 hours a week, which works out to roughly $500-1,100 a month and covers the appointment book, the recall list, SMS reminders, claiming admin and accounts follow-up. Reporting and any reactivation or campaign work sits on the specialist tier at $18-25.

Placement takes 7-10 business days, with 5-7 supervised days inside your Core Practice before any solo work, starting on the diary and recalls and layering in claiming and billing once the earlier work holds up clean. The $500 deposit is refundable and credited to your first month, there is a 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and notice is 14 days with no lock-in beyond that. We have made 87+ Australian placements since 2024, and Jenn takes every discovery call herself.

If you want the wider view, the dental practices page goes deeper on what a VA covers across a clinic, the virtual receptionist task page breaks down the front-desk work specifically, and if unpaid gap fees are the part keeping you up, the invoice chasing page is the one to read. The VA cost guide has the full pricing picture. Otherwise, book a discovery call with Jenn and bring your recall list.