Last updated: 2026-09-29
Practices running Tebra bring on a virtual medical assistant once the billing queues outlast the front desk. What changed when Kareo became Tebra shapes who you can hire more than it shapes the daily job. Permissions get settled on day one, before anyone opens a chart. The appointment schedule is the first queue most offices hand across, and eligibility checks follow, run before the visit rather than after a denial. Charge entry comes next, then the claim rejections holding up payment, then patient statements and the balances behind them. Portal messages sit in the same pair of hands. Weekly reports say whether any of it moved. How long a new hire needs to get fluent is worth asking early, and so is what a remote hire should never touch. What the hours cost, and where these Tebra staffing facts come from, close it out.
Tebra practices bring on a virtual medical assistant because the billing half of the platform keeps producing work after the last patient leaves. Kareo built its name on practice management and medical billing, and Tebra carries that lineage, so a Tebra office commonly runs its own claims instead of shipping them to a billing company. That choice saves money right up until the person answering phones is also the person posting charges. Then the schedule slips or the claims do, and the claims lose that contest almost every time, because a patient standing at the counter is louder than a rejection sitting in a queue. A virtual medical assistant absorbs the half nobody sees. You're buying hours against a named queue rather than a salary against a job title, and the desk keeps the counter.
The first question worth answering isn't who to hire. It's which queue you want off the desk by Friday.
What changed is mostly the vocabulary wrapped around the same practice management and billing work. Kareo and PatientPop combined in November 2021 to form Tebra, pairing Kareo's EHR and medical billing tools with PatientPop's practice growth and patient engagement products. For a practice hiring remote help, that merger carries one consequence worth planning around. Candidates describe the same experience under two names, and plenty of resumes still say Kareo, because Kareo is what the person trained on. Screen for both words or you'll filter out people who already know your system.
The reverse trap is real too. Someone listing Tebra may have worked only the patient engagement and reputation side, which is a different job from posting charges and chasing rejections. Ask which modules they sat in every day, and ask before the interview ends.
A Tebra virtual medical assistant should get the narrowest role that still covers the queue you're handing over, and nothing past it. Permissions come from the practice, because the account belongs to the practice, so the call is yours rather than a staffing firm's. Settle it before the first shift instead of during it. The scoping questions that matter are below.
Review the role after a month, since a queue that grew and one that never opened both argue for a change. A Business Associate Agreement is signed before anyone reaches protected health information, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sets out on its HIPAA pages what a covered entity still owns.
A Tebra virtual medical assistant works the appointment schedule by owning the calendar from the booking through the follow-up on a slot that went empty. Bookings and reschedules run against the visit types and provider columns your practice already built, so nobody is inventing a template from scratch. Confirmations go out ahead of the day. Cancellations get backfilled from a waitlist the assistant keeps current, which is the part that quietly pays for the hire. Recall and overdue-patient outreach lives here too, and it's the first work to slide whenever the desk is short two people.
What stays in the building is the judgment call. Whether to double-book a heavy Monday, whether to drop an established patient into a new-patient slot, whether to hold a spot open for a referral that hasn't arrived. Your assistant prepares the option and flags it, and a manager decides.
A Tebra virtual medical assistant runs eligibility checks by working the next few days of the schedule in advance, patient by patient, and writing down what the payer returns. Plan status and effective dates come first, then the copay, coinsurance and deductible your front desk will quote at check-in. Whether the visit type needs a referral on file is the second question. Prior authorization is the third, and it's the one that wrecks a week when it's missed, since imaging, procedures and higher-cost drugs commonly need it filed through the payer's own portal. Authorization numbers, unit counts and expiration dates go back into the patient's record so the biller reads them at claim time, not after a denial.
Where a payer wants extra clinical detail, the assistant assembles the packet and routes it, while a provider still makes the clinical case. Our walk-through of how a virtual assistant handles prior authorization covers that handoff in more depth.
A Tebra virtual medical assistant can own the mechanical half of charge entry, meaning posting what a provider already documented and chasing what a provider hasn't. Encounters get matched to the right patient, date of service, rendering provider and place of service. Codes go in as the provider selected them, with modifiers carried across rather than picked fresh. Missing charges are the real prize, because an encounter closed without a charge is revenue your practice never bills and never notices. Payment posting, remittance entry and reconciling a deposit against what posted all fit the same role.
Code selection doesn't. Choosing the code is a coding decision, and rules published by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on its coding and billing pages sit behind those choices. A practice that wants coding done remotely should hire a coder and say so in the job description.
A Tebra virtual medical assistant clears claim rejections by working them the day they land, since a rejection is a claim that never reached the payer and the timely filing clock keeps running anyway. Most rejections are clerical, such as a subscriber ID off by one digit, a policy that ended last month, a taxonomy or NPI mismatch, or a diagnosis pointer that doesn't line up against the code. Your assistant reads the clearinghouse message, corrects the field, resubmits and logs what the fix was. That log is worth more than the fix itself, because five or six reasons account for most of a small practice's rejections, and naming them is how you stop generating them.
Denials are a different animal and need someone who can read a payer policy and build an appeal. Our guide to how to reduce claim denials separates the two and shows where the appeal work starts.
A Tebra virtual medical assistant handles patient statements and balances by running the cycle on a fixed date and then answering the calls it creates. Statements go out on your practice's schedule, not whenever somebody remembers. Balances get aged, and the assistant sorts them into what a patient genuinely owes, what's parked behind an unposted insurance payment, and what's a credit you need to refund. That middle bucket is where most billing complaints come from, and it's an internal problem wearing a patient's name.
Calls about a bill get answered with the chart and the remittance open, which is what turns an argument into a payment plan. Write-off authority stays with the practice. So does the decision to send an account to collections, and your assistant's job is to bring you the list with its history attached rather than to make that call alone.
The administrative half of the patient portal belongs to a Tebra virtual medical assistant, and the clinical half doesn't. Portal invitations and intake forms go out before the visit, which is the cheapest way anyone has found to shorten a check-in. Demographic and insurance updates a patient submits get checked against the record rather than trusted into it. Non-clinical messages get answered, covering hours, directions, forms, balances and rescheduling. Anything asking what a result means, whether a symptom matters, or whether to keep taking something goes to a provider with the chart attached and a note saying it wasn't answered.
Result release is a provider decision and your assistant never opens that gate. Many practices that came to Tebra for the PatientPop side want review requests and reminder campaigns handled here too. That's fine, though it's marketing work, and it belongs in the job description as marketing work.
A Tebra virtual medical assistant should run the same short set of reports every week, chosen for what they measure rather than for what a menu calls them, because report names shift between releases and every practice's build is its own. Six numbers tell a small office almost everything about whether the remote hire is working. Pull them on the same weekday, keep them in one place, and give your assistant a standing slot to walk you through what moved.
| What the number measures | What a bad reading points at |
|---|---|
| Encounters closed with no charge posted | Revenue never billed, commonly a provider sign-off gap |
| Claims submitted against claims created | A submission queue nobody is emptying |
| Rejections still open past 48 hours | Timely filing exposure building quietly |
| Insurance accounts receivable over 90 days | Follow-up work stalled at the payer |
| Patient balance aging by bucket | A statement cycle that slipped, or credits sitting unrefunded |
| Unfilled slots and no-shows by provider | Waitlist and recall outreach not happening |
Reading the direction is the whole discipline. One week's aging number means almost nothing on its own, and four straight weeks of it climbing while the hours held steady is a conversation for month one rather than month six. Ask for the two-line story behind anything that jumped.
No published figure says how long a virtual medical assistant needs to get fluent in Tebra, and any staffing firm quoting one is quoting its own sales deck. What a practice can do instead is measure it. Pick two queues, write down what clearing them looks like, and check those numbers weekly against the baseline you took before anyone started. Someone already working in Tebra or Kareo starts further along than someone learning both the platform and your payer mix at once, which is the argument for matching on software experience up front.
Honest Taskers can prioritize candidates familiar with a client's system, and role-specific training can be provided, though with more than 200 EHR systems in the market nobody is trained on all of them. Most Honest Taskers placements complete within one to three weeks of a signed agreement, so the ramp begins sooner than the search suggests.
A Tebra virtual medical assistant should never touch a clinical decision, an irreversible financial action, or a job that needs hands in the building. Diagnosis, treatment plans, triage, approving a refill and telling a patient what a result means belong to licensed providers wherever those providers sit. Rooming, specimen handling, vital signs and the cash drawer stay on site. On the money side, write-offs, refunds, fee schedule edits and voiding a posted payment are practice decisions that a remote hire prepares and an owner approves.
Honest Taskers staff perform administrative and clinically adjacent work only. The talent pool includes licensed nurses and physicians, and that describes who applies rather than what a placement is allowed to do. One company-level limit is worth naming as well. Honest Taskers describes its security environment as SOC 2 audit ready and doesn't publish the independent SOC 2 or ISO examinations a couple of larger firms do, and its people are recruited offshore.
A Tebra virtual medical assistant costs $10.00 to $12.65 an hour through Honest Taskers, billed hourly, the rate set by role, background, schedule and location. Twenty hours a week runs roughly $800 to $1,012 a month, and forty hours comes to about $1,600 to $2,024. Set that against the same Tebra work at a desk in your building. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median for medical secretaries and administrative assistants at $22.08 an hour, or $45,930 a year, in its "Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics" release for May 2025, and its Employer Costs for Employee Compensation data for March 2026 puts benefits for office and administrative support roles near 48.7% above wages.
Demand pushes the other way. The same agency projects 13% growth in medical assistant employment from 2025 to 2035 in its Occupational Outlook Handbook. New clients can start with a two-week working trial on the first selected professional, and Honest Taskers reports 99.6% average monthly retention. Our breakdown of how much does a virtual medical assistant cost prices it against a salaried seat.
Honest Taskers rates, the two-week working trial, the recruiting regions, the retention figure and the compliance posture come from the company's own rate card, service terms and compliance materials. Wage and employer-cost figures come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, specifically its "Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics" release for May 2025 under code 43-6013, its Employer Costs for Employee Compensation data for March 2026, and its Occupational Outlook Handbook for the medical assistant projection. What a covered entity still owns sits with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and coding and billing rules with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The November 2021 Kareo and PatientPop combination is the companies' own announcement. Competitor headings for this page are unverified, because the network policy in use blocks the fetches that would have read them, and no savings percentage appears anywhere above.
Pricing the hours is only half the decision, and the other half is choosing which Tebra queues leave the building at all. Practices that get this backwards hand over the loud work and keep the quiet work, then wonder why the aging report didn't move. Our walk-through of how a virtual assistant works in Tebra follows the access side from the login outward, which is the same arrangement read from the candidate's chair. Sorting the queue before the first interview is what makes everything after it simple.
Deciding what to outsource is the step most offices skip, and not every job should leave the desk. The cleanest starting point is our list of tasks to outsource to a virtual medical assistant, which sorts the work by how much on-site presence each job genuinely needs. Two columns will do it, one for work that needs a person in the room and one for work that only needs a login. Mark them against your own Tebra queues and the role writes itself.
