MedicalDirector Virtual Assistant: a VA who works Pracsoft and the Clinical Inbox without ever opening a record

You don’t search “medicaldirector virtual assistant” out of curiosity. You search it because the recall list in Clinical is longer than it was last month, there’s a stack of rejected claims sitting unworked in Pracsoft’s Online Claiming, and the receptionist who knew exactly where everything lived across MD and Pracsoft has just gone on leave or handed in her notice. That’s usually the moment a practice manager starts looking for help that doesn’t need to physically sit at the front desk.

MedicalDirector has a screen for every administrative job a general practice has ever invented. Pracsoft holds the appointment book, the accounts and the Online Claiming engine that talks straight to Medicare. Clinical holds the recall and reminder lists and the Holding File where results land for the doctor. The system was never the bottleneck. The hours were. Every one of those admin screens still needs a person to work it, and that person is usually you, in the gaps between answering the phone and reconciling yesterday’s batch.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your MedicalDirector

The morning starts with a pass over the Pracsoft appointment book. Reschedules processed, cancellations backfilled off the waiting list, new patients booked with their demographics entered properly the first time: Medicare number, DVA card where it applies, concession status, contact details that the recall system will actually be able to use later. A VA who lives in Pracsoft moves through the book faster than most casual receptionists, because the keystrokes and the screens are muscle memory rather than a daily puzzle.

Then the money work, which is where a MedicalDirector VA earns their keep. Bulk-bill and DVA vouchers get built and transmitted through Pracsoft’s Online Claiming to Medicare, then the Online Claiming reports get worked daily: paid claims reconciled, pending claims watched, and rejections reworked while they’re still warm instead of piling up to be untangled at the end of the quarter. Demographic and card-number corrections get made in the patient record, write-offs and re-bills get queued for your sign-off, and anything touching an item number gets flagged to the GP with the Medicare reason code attached. The VA never changes an item number on their own initiative. That part is claiming admin done properly, not clinical billing decisions, and the line between the two is written into their brief.

Then recalls, with the division of labour exactly where your accreditation surveyor wants it. Your GPs review results in their Holding File and decide whether a recall is needed; only after a doctor has actioned a result and flagged the recall does it reach the VA. From there the VA works the recall list, contacts the patient through your approved SMS or phone workflow, logs every attempt as a contact note, books the appointment, and runs the next round per your written protocol when a patient goes quiet. The VA never opens a result and never decides what one means. Execution, never interpretation, the same line the medical practices page holds.

Weekly, the reminder cycle. The routine care that keeps a general practice both clinically sound and funded, care plan reviews, health assessments, immunisations, cervical screening due-dates, gets pulled by reason and date range and sent through your approved templates. Those reminders stop depending on whoever happened to remember, and every send is logged so the trail is there at accreditation time.

There’s a clerical results step too, and it’s worth being precise about because it’s the one most likely to be misread. Incoming results need to be matched to the right patient and routed to the correct doctor’s Holding File so nothing sits unallocated for days. That routing is admin, and the VA can do it. Reading the result, deciding what it means, deciding whether it’s urgent: none of that moves to the VA, ever. They route and they chase the doctor for unactioned items. They do not triage.

And the scanning queue. Inbound correspondence and scanned paper gets worked to your protocol: non-clinical documents filed where the protocol says, anything clinical allocated to the GP’s Holding File for review. The VA files admin. Doctors file medicine.

The honest bit

A couple of things MedicalDirector genuinely will not do for you, no matter who you hire.

If you’re on the on-premise version of Clinical and Pracsoft rather than Helix, there is no browser login to simply hand a VA. They reach your MD the way your doctors do from home, through secure remote access into your practice environment, and standing that up is an IT job before it’s a hiring job. Quick if you’re hosted with a medical IT provider, slower if the server is the box humming under the front desk. We don’t start the placement until that access is secure and locked to the VA’s own named account. Helix practices skip this entirely, because the cloud version is browser-based, but pretending the on-premise install is just as simple would not survive one conversation with your IT support.

The other honest line is the front desk itself. Arriving patients, the waiting room, and any patient-paid gap or private fee taken through a Tyro or HICAPS terminal all stay with whoever is physically at reception. The patient has to be present to tap a card or sign for a gap, so that step is not a remote job and we won’t pretend it is. A MedicalDirector VA clears the work that piles up behind the desk; they don’t replace the person standing at it.

What stays with you

This is general practice, so the boundary is not a nice-to-have, it’s the whole basis of the arrangement.

Clinical records, consultation and progress notes, prescribing, results interpretation, recall and urgency decisions, item-number selection, and My Health Record all stay with the GP and the practice. Item selection in particular is a clinical and compliance decision that never moves to the VA, no matter how billing-heavy the scope gets: the VA processes and transmits what the GP has raised and reworks the rejections, but the clinical content of a claim stays clinical.

And the notes part isn’t just a policy we wrote on top of the software. MedicalDirector controls access per user, so the VA’s login is set to a reception or admin role with the clinical record, prescribing and the doctor’s Holding File review outside their access. Those functions don’t open for them. The recall and results-routing work they do touch is clerical only, and it only ever begins after a doctor has reviewed and actioned the underlying result. My Health Record access stays off for every medical placement, without exception.

What it costs and where to start

MedicalDirector admin sits on our admin tier, $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST. A billing-heavy scope where the VA owns the full Pracsoft claiming cycle, building and sending batches, working the Online Claiming reports daily and reworking every rejection, runs at the specialist tier, $18-25 an hour. Most practices land at 15-20 hours a week, roughly $1,000-1,700 a month, covering the Pracsoft book, the bulk-bill and DVA batching, the recall and reminder cycle and the document queue. Smaller two-GP clinics often start at 12-15 hours and grow only if the work is genuinely there.

Placement runs 7-10 business days. The first week or so is supervised inside your MD and Pracsoft before anything solo, the first 30 days carry the recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and after that nothing holds you past 14 days notice. The $500 deposit is refundable and comes off your first month.

The medical practices page covers the industry side properly, including the My Health Record and recall-boundary lines, the medical and NDIS billing task page goes deeper on the claiming admin specifically, and the VA cost guide breaks the pricing down in full. Otherwise book a discovery call with Jenn. She takes every one of them, has placed 87+ VAs into Australian businesses since 2024, and if your practice isn’t ready for one yet she’ll tell you before you’ve spent a dollar. Bring your recall count and your unworked Online Claiming rejections to the call; that’s almost always where the first fifteen hours live.