Last updated: 2026-09-22
Two practices can pay the same rate and get completely different results, because the number that decided the outcome was hours a week. How healthcare virtual assistant pricing changes as that weekly count moves is where this page starts. What a 20 hour week buys a practice comes next, then what a 40 hour week adds that 20 assistant hours cannot cover on the same day. Why some practices start below that, at 10 or 15, follows, and after it, where during the clinic day those hours should sit. How a time zone stretch widens the usable window is the part almost nobody writes down. Which front desk duties need a daily block rather than a weekly one comes after it, then how many assistant hours a single provider panel absorbs, and what happens to a waiting room when a practice buys too few of them. Raising hours later without restarting onboarding has its own method, splitting hours across two assistants has its own overhead, and what an assistant hour doesn't include is the honest end of the arithmetic. Where these pricing figures come from closes the page.
Pricing changes by multiplication and nothing else. Honest Taskers bills $10.00 to $12.65 an hour, so the weekly hour count is the one variable a practice controls at the point of purchase. Twenty hours a week lands near $800 to $1,012 a month at four weeks to a month, and forty lands near $1,600 to $2,024. Where a placement sits inside that band moves with the candidate's healthcare experience, education, location, role, specialty, language, schedule and part-time or full-time status, not with the size of the block. That's worth stating plainly, since plenty of vendor marketing promises an hourly rate that falls once volume rises. Honest Taskers publishes one range and leaves it alone. So the question in front of a practice manager isn't how to win a cheaper hour, it's how many hours the work needs and when in the day they have to land.
Every figure in the table is arithmetic on that published range at four weeks to a month, with the low end worked at $10.00 an hour and the high end at $12.65.
| Hours a week | Hours a month | Monthly range | Shape across a five-day clinic week |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | 40 | $400 to $506 | Two hours a day, enough for one expiring queue |
| 15 | 60 | $600 to $759 | Three hours a day, one queue plus an overflow tray |
| 20 | 80 | $800 to $1,012 | Four hours a day, a morning or an afternoon block |
| 25 | 100 | $1,000 to $1,265 | Five hours a day, a block that overlaps both sessions |
| 30 | 120 | $1,200 to $1,518 | Six hours a day, most of the working day covered |
| 40 | 160 | $1,600 to $2,024 | Eight hours a day, open to close in one time zone |
A 20 hour week buys four hours a day across five days, and picturing it that way beats thinking of 80 monthly hours sitting in a pool. Four hours covers one queue properly and a second one partly. In a single-provider family practice, a morning block of that size will return the overnight voicemail, confirm tomorrow's schedule, run eligibility checks against the next day's visits, triage the non-clinical portal messages and route refill requests to the right clinician. Monthly, that's $800 to $1,012. What it doesn't buy is the whole front desk. Somebody in the building still answers the window, still takes the walk-in, and still picks up the call that arrives at 2:40 pm when the block ended at noon. Twenty hours is a queue purchase rather than a coverage purchase, and the practices that write it down in those words are much calmer in month two than the ones that expected a medical receptionist in every sense.
A 40 hour week adds same-day turnaround, which is a different product from more output. At 20 hours, work arriving after the block ends waits for tomorrow, so a prior authorization request landing at 1 pm gets its first payer call at 9 the next morning. Forty hours gets the same request called that afternoon, while the payer's line is open and the clinical note is fresh in the chart. The monthly number runs about $1,600 to $2,024 at the same rate band. So the second twenty hours buys speed rather than extra volume. Referrals go out the day they're ordered, records requests get answered inside the business day, and cancellations get backfilled from the waitlist before the slot goes cold. A low-volume practice with no time-sensitive queues gains little from that upgrade and should stay where it is. One carrying authorizations, referrals and a same-day sick schedule finds most of the value there.
Because the work hasn't been written down yet. A practice that can't name the exact queue it's handing over will buy the wrong hour count whatever number it picks, and 10 or 15 hours a week is a cheaper place to discover that than 40. Ten hours runs about $400 to $506 a month and fifteen about $600 to $759. Month one of a small block goes on documentation more than production, which is the whole point of starting there. Honest Taskers offers new clients a two-week working trial with their first selected professional, subject to current service terms, and that window fits the same idea. One caution belongs here. A ten-hour block is harder to staff well, since predictable, meaningful schedules attract and keep stronger candidates than a handful of scattered hours ever will. Keep even a small block contiguous and at the same clock time each day.
Assistant hours belong where the queue's own clock runs, which for front-office work means the two ends of the clinic day rather than the middle of it. Three constraints decide the placement, and none of them are about the assistant. Payer phone lines and payer portals keep business hours in your zone, so eligibility checks and authorization follow-up have to happen inside that window. Reminder calls have to land the day before, late enough that patients are home to answer them. Overnight voicemail and portal messages need clearing before the first session starts, or the provider walks into a full inbox at 8 am. Honest Taskers professionals work the client's time zone and approved schedule, including evening and weekend blocks where that's agreed, so the hours can be placed against those three constraints instead of around anybody's local daylight. Write the schedule as clock times in your own zone, never as a weekly total.
A time zone stretch works by putting the block on the edges of your day that in-house staff can't reach without overtime. Honest Taskers recruits in the Philippines, Latin America, India and Pakistan, and its professionals work the client's US time zone rather than their own. So a Pacific practice can open a block at 6 am local, which is 9 am on the East Coast, where many payers and referral partners are already answering. The other end stretches the same way. A block running to 7 pm catches the patients who call after work about tomorrow's visit, and it bills at the same $10.00 to $12.65 an hour as a 10 am block does. Nobody's rate card mentions this, and it's the single biggest thing weekly hours buy. The limit is fairness rather than feasibility. Your assistant is working your clock, so treat a schedule change as a real change, give notice, and don't rotate the block week to week.
Front desk duties need a daily block whenever the work expires. Anything tied to tomorrow's schedule, an open payer line or a patient waiting on an answer loses most of its value overnight. Five queues run daily in a working practice.
Recall lists, unscheduled treatment follow-up and aging reports batch fine once a week. Authorization work punishes weekly batching hardest, and the American Medical Association collects its physician survey work on prior authorization in one place. A fuller inventory sits in our list of tasks to delegate to a medical receptionist.
No published figure answers that, and any vendor who hands you one is guessing at your schedule. The count turns on visit volume, payer mix, how much intake your portal already absorbs and how much paper your specialty still generates, so a dermatology panel and a behavioral health panel land nowhere near each other on identical headcount. Measure it instead of borrowing a number. For one week, have the front desk tally minutes against five buckets, such as confirmation calls, eligibility checks, referral and authorization work, portal replies and records requests. Add the minutes, divide by 60, and the weekly hour figure you get is grounded in your own schedule. Round up, because a tally like that always misses interruptions. Then buy the tier above it, since the step from 15 to 20 hours a week costs $200 to $253 a month and an uncovered queue costs considerably more than that.
The waiting room absorbs the shortfall, which is why underbuying hours surfaces as a patient experience problem long before it surfaces on a budget line. Work nobody covered doesn't evaporate. It lands on the person at the window, who is now answering the phone with a patient standing in front of her, so hold times grow, check-in slows and the 9:20 appointment starts at 9:40. Confirmations that go out late feed the no-show rate, and MGMA's DataDive Practice Operations aggregate put the single-specialty no-show rate at 6.81% in 2023 (Source: MGMA, 2023). Backlog compounds on top of that. Tomorrow's block opens on yesterday's leftovers, so a 10 hour week spends its first hour catching up and the practice decides the assistant is slow when the block was simply too small. Desk staff feel all of this first, which is the subject of our piece on medical front desk burnout.
You raise the hours and leave the scope alone. Onboarding restarts when a professional needs a system, a module or a queue they don't already hold, never when the same work simply runs longer, so extending an existing block inside existing duties costs a schedule change and nothing more. Four habits keep that clean. Extend at an end of the block the person already works, rather than bolting on a disconnected evening shift. Give real notice, because they're working your clock and a new start time rearranges their whole day. Put the new hours in writing with your Customer Success Advocate so the schedule of record matches what's happening on the ground. Re-check the Business Associate Agreement and the access grants only where the extra hours reach protected health information the role didn't touch before. The first version of that same process is laid out in our guide to onboarding a virtual medical assistant.
No, splitting hours across two healthcare assistants doesn't change the hourly rate, and 40 hours still runs about $1,600 to $2,024 a month whether one person works it or two people work 20 each. Everything around the rate changes though. Two placements mean two onboardings, two sets of system credentials, two people briefed on your protocols and a handoff that somebody has to design. Each person also carries less context, so the patient who called Tuesday explains herself again on Thursday. Splitting earns that overhead in two situations. The first is genuine coverage width, such as an early East Coast block and a late Pacific block that no single schedule can hold. Skill split is the other one, such as a person on phones and intake alongside a person on billing and authorizations, where the training barely overlaps anyway. Splitting as insurance against a bad hire is the weak reason, since unlimited replacement support already covers that ground.
An assistant hour buys the professional's working time on the duties in the written scope, and four things sit outside it. Your own time isn't in there, and it's heaviest in week one, because somebody in the practice answers questions, reviews output and makes the calls the assistant can't. Clinical judgment isn't in there either. Honest Taskers professionals do administrative and clinically adjacent work and don't give clinical advice or make clinical decisions, so triage and anything needing a licensed opinion stays with your providers, even though the talent pool includes licensed nurses and physicians. Software isn't in there. The electronic health record seat, the extension on a phone platform such as Nextiva or RingCentral, and the fax line are all yours to buy. And this hour isn't the same unit as an in-house desk hour, which carries employer load on top of wages. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts median hourly pay for medical secretaries and administrative assistants, occupation code 43-6013, at $22.08 in its "Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics" release for May 2025.
The hourly range, the trial terms, the recruiting geography, the time zone rule, the replacement policy and the scope limits all come from Honest Taskers' own published rate card and service terms (Honest Taskers, 2026). Every monthly number on this page is arithmetic on that range at four weeks to a month, so read each one as arithmetic rather than as a quote for your practice. Wage context is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics release for May 2025. The no-show figure is MGMA's DataDive Practice Operations aggregate for 2023. Three numbers a reader might expect are absent on purpose. No savings percentage appears, because one would have to assume your wages, your benefit load and which of your tasks move at all. Per-provider hour figures are missing too, since nobody publishes one worth citing. Competitor rate cards are left out for a third reason, which is that they're self-published, unaudited and changed without notice.
Sizing the week is one decision. Picking the company that places the person, understanding what the role covers before you buy an hour of it, and settling the questions worth asking during hiring are three more, and each of them has a page of its own.
Provider choice and hour sizing pull against each other more than buyers expect. Some firms set a weekly minimum and a multi-month initial term, so a queue you sized at 12 hours can turn into a 20 hour invoice before anybody has measured anything. Others bill whatever block you set. Published rates stay rare across this market, commitment terms run from cancel-anytime to full-time-only, and only a handful of firms name a signed Business Associate Agreement rather than a training badge. Who publishes what is set out in our ranking of virtual healthcare assistant companies, which is the right page to read before the hour count gets fixed in a contract.
Hours get much easier to size once the boundaries of the role are clear on paper. Honest Taskers professionals handle administrative and clinically adjacent work, such as scheduling, insurance verification, intake, records and patient communication, and that work stops short of clinical advice and clinical decisions. The boundary changes your hour count directly, because a queue you assumed was one job can turn out to be two, with one half staying in the building. Duties, software and the limits on the role are walked through in our explainer on what is a virtual healthcare assistant, which is worth reading before you commit to a number for the week.
Hour count belongs inside the interview rather than after it. Ask which hours a candidate can hold in your time zone, whether the schedule is fixed or rotating, what happens to your block during their local holidays, and who covers it when they're out sick. Then find out what notice a schedule change needs and how a replacement inherits the block. Most Honest Taskers placements complete within one to three weeks of a signed agreement, so those answers arrive sooner than practices tend to plan for. The rest of that conversation is collected in our guide on what to know before hiring a virtual healthcare assistant.
Speak with Honest Taskers about sizing a weekly support block for your practice.
