Last updated: 2026-09-28
Splitting an obstetric practice's workload between a remote seat and the people in the building starts with presence, not price. Where an OB-GYN virtual medical assistant sits against the staff working the exam room is the first question, and the honest answer runs through the pelvic exam, pap collection and sonography duties that never leave the office. Then it's worth naming the prenatal calendar and device coverage work that does move to a remote desk. Three of those jobs carry most of the weight, so you'll see how a whole prenatal visit series gets built at intake, how intrauterine device coverage gets confirmed before placement day, and how a postpartum patient gets brought back for her visit. Cost follows scope. The loaded employer cost of an in-house hire comes next, line by line, then what an OB-GYN virtual medical assistant bills per hour. After that come the practical calls, so which option answers the phone line sooner, what should decide where genetic screening follow-up lands, and whether a clinic can run both alongside each other. Why a missed prenatal visit costs an obstetric practice more than expected, and which published wage series underpin these figures, close it out.
An OB-GYN virtual medical assistant sits outside the building, inside your scheduling system, EHR and payer portals, while in-house exam room staff stand next to the patient. Skill isn't what separates the two. Presence is. Anything needing a hand on a speculum, a probe or a syringe stays with the nurses and medical assistants you employ, and anything needing only a login can move to a remote desk. Clinically adjacent work, such as chart prep for a new obstetric intake or result dispatch under provider instruction, sits between the two and moves only where a licensed provider still makes the call. Money follows that same line. An employee draws a salary plus the employer load whether or not the week holds forty hours of work, while a remote professional bills only for the hours you assign. Obstetrics tilts the split further than most specialties, because one pregnancy generates a year of appointments, authorizations and recalls.
Every duty that puts hands or a probe on a patient stays with in-house clinical staff, and that boundary is the floor of the remote model, so it belongs here rather than after a price table. An OB-GYN virtual medical assistant can't do any of the following.
Where most of an open role sits on that list, the comparison is already settled and you're hiring in-house. Read on where a real share of the work is administrative, which in obstetrics and gynecology it commonly is, because a single pregnancy throws off a standing queue of visits, verifications and recalls nobody in the exam room has time to work. Writing the split down on paper is the first time many practices see how much of the load never needed the building at all.
The work that shifts is everything living in software, which covers more of an obstetric week than the exam room schedule suggests. Deciding what to outsource starts with that single test. A remote professional can carry all of the following.
Ultrasound scheduling deserves its own line, because an anatomy scan, a growth scan and a nuchal translucency window each have to land inside a date range the provider sets, and a sonographer's day fills fast. A remote professional holds those slots when the series is built rather than hunting for them later. One boundary runs the length of that list. Coordinating a screening means ordering, tracking and routing, never telling a patient what a cell-free DNA result means for her pregnancy. A HIPAA-trained professional works inside a HIPAA-compliant arrangement once a signed Business Associate Agreement is in place, and your practice keeps control of every system permission granted.
An OB-GYN virtual medical assistant lays it out by working backward from the estimated due date at the first obstetric visit, then booking the whole schedule in one sitting. Monthly visits through the second trimester, the twice-monthly stretch, the weekly run to term, the anatomy scan and the glucose tolerance draw all land on the calendar before the patient leaves. Building it once rather than visit by visit is what keeps the series intact, because a patient who has to call back for each appointment eventually stops calling. Obstetric care is billed as a global package, so a gap in the series is an administrative problem as much as a clinical one, and the documented visit history needs to match what the global code describes. Your assistant also sets the reminder cadence and flags any patient slipping two visits, which is the earliest point anybody can reach her without a long chase.
An OB-GYN virtual medical assistant confirms it by running the benefit check the moment the placement is booked, not the morning the patient walks in. She calls or portals the plan, confirms the device falls under the contraceptive benefit rather than the pharmacy benefit, records the copay and the deductible position, checks whether the plan wants buy-and-bill or a shipped device, and files the authorization number in the chart. Buy-and-bill is where an obstetric practice loses money quietly, because the device is stocked, the room is held and the visit is booked long before anybody learns the plan won't pay. Long-acting contraceptives such as a levonorgestrel or copper intrauterine device, a contraceptive implant or a sterilization procedure each carry their own rules, and those rules move by plan year. Getting the answer in writing a week ahead gives the front desk room to reschedule rather than eat the cost.
An OB-GYN virtual medical assistant brings her back by booking the postpartum visit before discharge, then working a short recall sequence through the weeks that follow. Practices know this as the appointment their obstetric series misses most, and the reasons are logistical rather than clinical, so a newborn at home, no childcare, a work return date and a mother who feels fine all push it down the list. A remote professional calls at an hour that suits a new mother, offers an earlier or later slot, confirms a telehealth option where the provider has approved one, and rebooks a no-show the same week instead of letting it lapse. Blood pressure follow-up after a hypertensive pregnancy and contraception planning both hang off that visit, which is why the recall queue is worth staffing properly. For the wider menu of duties, see our list of tasks to outsource to a virtual medical assistant.
About $68,252 a year is what one in-house administrative hire costs an OB-GYN practice, against an advertised salary of $45,930. US medical secretaries and administrative assistants earned that median (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics", May 2025). Employer load components are broken out below so nothing gets counted twice (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Employer Costs for Employee Compensation", March 2026).
| Cost line | What it covers | On top of wages | Per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base salary | The advertised pay for the role | n/a | $45,930 |
| Insurance | Health and related coverage | 17.5% | $8,038 |
| Paid leave | Vacation, sick days and holidays | 11.9% | $5,466 |
| Legally required | Employer FICA, unemployment, workers' compensation | 10.2% | $4,685 |
| Supplemental pay | Overtime, bonuses and shift differentials | 4.5% | $2,067 |
| Retirement and savings | Employer contributions and match | 4.5% | $2,067 |
| All-in recurring | What the seat costs before equipment or space | 48.7% | about $68,252 |
Recurring cost is all that table holds, and two other bills sit outside it. Filling the seat runs an average $5,475 per hire for non-executive roles (Source: SHRM, "2025 Benchmarking Report"), and it arrives again on every departure, with a full replacement costing roughly six to nine months of salary once lost output is counted. Equipment and workspace come second, and they swing too much between practices to carry a national number. Coverage is a third cost the table hides, because a single front desk person is one point of failure, so a maternity leave or a resignation drops the prenatal calendar and the payer queue onto clinical staff.
An OB-GYN virtual medical assistant bills $10.00 to $12.65 an hour, set by role, background, schedule and location, and charged only for hours worked with no weekly minimum. At 40 hours a week that's about $20,800 to $26,312 a year, and at 20 hours a week about $10,400 to $13,156. None of the employer load applies, so there's no payroll tax, no benefits, no paid leave and no workspace, because you're buying hours rather than employing a person. Part-time is the figure obstetric practices tend to miss. A half-time front desk role is hard to hire and harder to keep, so an in-house seat becomes a full-time commitment even where the prenatal calendar and the device verification queue only fill mornings. Honest Taskers recruits in the Philippines, Latin America, India and Pakistan, and professionals work your US time zone. For the rate detail on its own, our guide on how much a virtual medical assistant costs breaks it down further.
The remote professional answers the line sooner, because most Honest Taskers placements complete within one to three weeks of a signed agreement while an in-house hire runs a full recruiting cycle first. Your first selected professional comes with a two-week working trial, so an obstetric practice tests the fit against real call volume before committing further. Recruiting a front desk employee in most US markets takes longer than three weeks before training even starts, and the phone keeps ringing while the seat sits empty. Turnover is the other half of the timing story. Honest Taskers reports 99.6% average monthly retention, and when a placement doesn't fit, the replacement runs through the same channel rather than a hiring cycle your office manager has to staff. A resignation at the front desk restarts recruiting and onboarding from zero, and it lands in the weeks a heavy delivery month has already stretched everyone thin.
Volume and repeatability should decide it, not how sensitive the subject feels. Prenatal genetic screening follow-up splits into two jobs that look similar and aren't. The first is coordination, so ordering the cell-free DNA or carrier panel, tracking the specimen, chasing the lab, filing the result in the chart and booking the appointment where the provider wants one. Counseling is the second, which means telling a patient what a positive screen means for her pregnancy, and it stays with the provider or the genetic counselor without exception. Honest Taskers professionals take the first job and never the second. Where a practice runs enough screening that coordination fills real hours every week, a remote seat is the cheaper place to put it. A clinic ordering a handful of panels a month, with a nurse already tracking them, doesn't need to hire anybody for it. Unsure whether the workload justifies either, our guide to the signs your practice needs a virtual assistant sizes it first.
Yes, and it's the arrangement most established OB-GYN practices land on. In-house staff keep the pelvic exam, pap collection, sonography, device placement, rooming and the front counter. The remote seat takes the phones, the prenatal calendar, benefit verification, prior authorizations, screening coordination and every recall queue. That's augmentation rather than replacement, and the first thing a clinical team notices is getting exam room hours back. Nobody on site loses a job. Queue work simply stops landing on a medical assistant hired to set up a speculum tray. Practices that struggle with the split shipped a whole role out instead of a queue, then found the on-site half had nobody covering it. Watch for a nurse spending half her afternoon inside a payer portal, because that's a loaded clinical wage paying for work an hourly remote seat clears at a fraction of the price.
Global obstetric billing is why, because the practice carries the whole episode rather than charging each prenatal visit as a standalone line. Documented visit history has to line up with what the global code describes, so a gap creates a records problem surfacing months later at delivery or during a payer review. Clinical risk sits alongside that, since those visits catch preeclampsia, gestational diabetes and growth problems, and a skipped window is a screening the practice never ran. The empty slot itself is the smaller loss. Rebooking is the larger one, because a missed visit has to be chased, reslotted and confirmed, and that work lands on whoever is already answering the phone. In-house staff price a no-show as one empty chair. In obstetrics it's an empty chair plus a records gap plus an hour of chase work nobody budgeted for.
Two Bureau of Labor Statistics series underpin it, and you can check both line by line. Wages come from the "Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics" program for May 2025, occupation code 43-6013, medical secretaries and administrative assistants. Employer load percentages come from the same agency's "Employer Costs for Employee Compensation" series for March 2026, office and administrative support in private industry, applied as separate components so paid leave and legally required benefits aren't counted twice. Cost per hire and replacement cost come from SHRM's "2025 Benchmarking Report". Honest Taskers rates come from the company's own published rate card. Every wage number here is a national median, so run the arithmetic against your own local pay band before deciding anything. A practice in a high-wage metro sits above this table, and a rural one sits below it.
Two OB-GYN staffing guides pick up where this comparison stops, one on vendors and one on the role itself.
Talk to Honest Taskers about moving the prenatal calendar off your exam room team.
