Last updated: 2026-09-08
Rate first, then everything the rate has to carry. Honest Taskers bills $10.00 to $12.65 an hour for telehealth support, and the hour itself is the easy half of the budget. Which telehealth tasks that hour covers is the harder half, because a virtual visit falls over at the pre-visit technical check more than anywhere else. A failed video connection is where the money goes, since a slot nobody could connect into was still staffed and still counted. Multi-state licensing sits behind every booking and adds administrative work that lands on your hours rather than on your rate. An in-house patient access clerk is the payroll comparison worth running, loaded rather than at base salary. Where these cost figures come from is set out at the end, along with the two numbers no honest page can print.
A telehealth virtual assistant costs $10.00 to $12.65 an hour at Honest Taskers, and where a candidate lands inside that band moves with their healthcare background, the schedule you need covered, the scope of the role and their location. Billing runs hourly, with no weekly minimum. There's no payroll tax on top, no benefits load, no paid leave and no workstation to buy, because you're buying hours rather than employing a person.
Translated to a monthly line item, 20 hours a week is about $800 to $1,012 and 40 hours a week about $1,600 to $2,024. Those are arithmetic, not a quote.
What moves a telehealth candidate up the band is rarely the same thing that moves a billing candidate up it. Comfort on the phone with an anxious patient counts here, because most of the job is spoken contact before the appointment. Prior work inside a video platform counts. So does availability at 7 a.m. or 7 p.m., since virtual schedules stretch past the hours a physical office keeps. Interview for those three and you'll know which end of the band you're hiring at before anyone quotes you.
Two things sit outside the hourly number, and a virtual-first practice feels both. Most placements complete within one to three weeks of a signed agreement, so the calendar cost of starting is short without being zero. The second is the ramp. Every new assistant spends the first weeks learning your platform, your payer mix and the way your clinicians want their day built, and you're paying the same rate while that happens. Hourly billing doesn't remove the ramp. It does mean the meter stops the week the arrangement ends.
Read the rate next to the work you plan to outsource, because a telehealth seat and a billing seat aren't the same job at the same price. Telehealth support skews toward patient contact before the appointment, which is a different skill mix from claim scrubbing and a different interview. For the pricing picture across roles, see our guide to how much a virtual medical assistant costs.
That rate covers the administrative work wrapped around a virtual visit, and the pre-visit technical check sits at the front of the stack. Somebody reaches the patient ahead of the appointment, confirms they can get into the platform, checks the link went to an address they still use, and makes sure audio and video both work on whatever device they'll be sitting in front of. Fallback details go in the record, such as a mobile number, a second email address and the name of the family member helping. That single job decides whether the visit happens at all.
Five recurring jobs make up most of a telehealth assistant's day, and each one attaches to a specific visit.
Eligibility runs differently for a virtual encounter than for an office one. Telehealth coverage varies by plan in ways in-person coverage doesn't, so the benefit check has to ask a narrower question and get it answered before the patient is on screen. Downstream, place-of-service and modifier accuracy on the claim is front-office documentation work, and getting it wrong turns a delivered visit into a denial six weeks later.
Between visits, the portal is the other half of the job. Messages land there overnight and on weekends, and a queue nobody works by Monday morning turns into phone calls by Tuesday. An assistant working that queue sorts it into what goes to a clinician, what goes to a scheduler and what needs a form resent, then routes each one without answering the clinical ones. Time zones complicate the same queue, because a practice whose patients aren't local is answering someone whose afternoon is your evening.
One boundary belongs in the role description before the first shift. A telehealth assistant never triages clinically, never tells a patient whether a virtual visit suits their symptoms, and never decides that an encounter should convert to in-person. Those are clinical calls, and a patient who asks one on the phone gets a callback rather than an answer. Honest Taskers professionals do administrative and clinically adjacent work only, which is the line to hold on the mornings when the queue is long.
Choosing which of these jobs leaves your front desk first is its own exercise, and our list of tasks to outsource to a virtual medical assistant lays out the wider menu.
A failed video connection turns into lost telehealth revenue by burning a slot that was already staffed, already scheduled and already counted in the day's capacity. Your clinician waits. The patient restarts the app, phones the front desk, or gives up. Eight minutes into a fifteen-minute slot the visit is gone, even while the patient is still trying to join.
Put your own number on that rather than borrowing one from a blog. Take the contracted rate you'd have billed for that visit type with that payer, multiply it by the connections your platform drops in a typical month, and you have a figure your finance conversation can survive. No per-visit dollar loss circulating online holds up to sourcing, which is why the honest version of this calculation runs on your fee schedule. For context on the wider gap, MGMA puts the national no-show range at 5% to 8% across single-specialty practices, with some specialties well above it, and a technical failure sits on top of that rather than inside it.
Recovery inside the slot is the part that pays for itself. An assistant watching the virtual waiting room calls the patient the moment a connection drops, walks them back in, and where video won't hold, moves the encounter onto the audio-only path your practice has already approved. Audio-only brings its own documentation, since the record needs to show that video was attempted, why it failed, and that the patient agreed to continue by phone. Written down, that's a two-minute task. Left with the clinician between patients, it becomes the note nobody finishes.
Measure the failures before you buy hours against them. Most telehealth platforms report how many scheduled encounters never reached a connected state, and your schedulers already know which appointment types drop most. Log four weeks of it. Count how many of those patients were reached again inside the same slot, how many moved to a phone call, and how many vanished from the day without a word. That last group is the revenue you're arguing about, and it's countable without a vendor study.
Reconnection work only lands when the assistant sits inside the systems where the appointment lives, meaning the schedule, the telehealth platform and the chart. Practices sizing that access up front can start with our explainer on whether a virtual assistant can work in your EHR.
Yes, multi-state licensing raises what telehealth support costs, though it raises the hours rather than the hourly rate. Licensure belongs to the clinician and stays there. What the front office inherits is the tracking that comes with it, and the tracking grows every time a provider adds a state.
Three administrative jobs come out of that. First is a current record of which states each provider holds a license in, so scheduling never books a visit nobody on your roster can deliver. Second, somebody confirms where the patient will physically be at the appointment hour, because the clinician has to be licensed where the patient is sitting rather than where the chart says they live. Routing the patient who has moved is the third, and it catches practices off guard, since a snowbird or a college student changes the answer without telling anybody.
Location checking feeds the money side too. Where a patient sits can change which plan rules apply to the encounter, so the location check and the eligibility check belong to one person on one morning. Splitting them across two people is how a visit gets delivered and then denied.
Ask a prospective provider how the roster gets kept current, because the answer separates the firms who have run a multi-state panel from the ones who haven't. A spreadsheet nobody owns goes stale in a quarter. Better answers name who updates it, when a renewal gets flagged, and what the assistant does with a patient whose stated location doesn't match the state on file. None of that is licensure work, and no assistant should be describing it as such. It's clerical maintenance of a record your clinicians depend on.
None of this shifts the compliance setup, which is settled identically whether your providers cover one state or eight. A Business Associate Agreement is signed before anyone reaches protected health information, professionals are HIPAA-trained under a dedicated HIPAA compliance officer, and Honest Taskers has its HIPAA compliance verified by Accountable. Practices working through what that means for a remote hire can read our piece on whether a virtual assistant can be HIPAA compliant.
Yes, an hourly telehealth assistant is priced below an in-house patient access clerk once employer load enters the comparison. US receptionists and information clerks earned a median $38,010 a year and medical secretaries and administrative assistants a median $45,930 (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics", May 2025). Wages aren't the whole cost of either seat.
For office and administrative support occupations in private industry, benefits add 48.7% on top of wages once paid leave, supplemental pay, insurance, retirement and legally required contributions are counted as separate components (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Employer Costs for Employee Compensation", March 2026). Applied to the medical secretary median, one in-house administrative seat runs about $68,252 a year before a desk, a headset or a platform license.
Run that against your own wage band, not the national median. A practice in a high-cost metro with strong benefits sits above $68,252, and a rural clinic sits under it. What matters is the loaded cost of your next patient access hire in your market.
Two costs live outside the annual figure. Filling the seat averages $5,475 per hire for non-executive roles (Source: SHRM, "2025 Benchmarking Report"), and it lands again on every departure. Coverage is the other one. A single in-house clerk gets sick, takes vacation and leaves at five, while telehealth visits keep landing in evening slots, so the practice pays overtime or lets the portal queue sit until morning.
Price isn't the only axis, and an in-house clerk wins on one of them. Somebody at the front desk can walk a confused patient through the lobby, hand them a tablet, and get them into the visit in person. A remote assistant can't do that, and for a practice whose telehealth patients tend to arrive on site anyway, that gap is worth paying for. Hourly support fits the practice whose virtual patients are at home, on their own devices, in three states.
Honest Taskers recruits in the Philippines, Latin America, India and Pakistan, and professionals work the client's US time zone, which is what makes an evening telehealth block coverable without an overtime line. Retention runs at 99.6% average monthly, worth knowing because a pre-visit queue handed to somebody who leaves is a queue you rebuild from scratch. New clients may receive a two-week working trial with their first selected professional, subject to current service terms, and two weeks is enough to watch the check land or not land. Still weighing whether the workload justifies any hire, you can size the problem before pricing it with our guide to the signs your practice needs a virtual assistant.
Three sources carry every number on this page. Honest Taskers rates, hourly billing, the two-week working trial and the 99.6% average monthly retention figure come from the company's own published terms. Wage and employer-load comparisons come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics "Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics" release for May 2025 and the "Employer Costs for Employee Compensation" series for March 2026, with the 48.7% load applied as separate components so paid leave and legally required benefits aren't double counted. The no-show range is MGMA's single-specialty aggregate, and the cost-per-hire average is SHRM's 2025 Benchmarking Report.
Two numbers are missing on purpose. Nobody publishes how many virtual visits one assistant can prepare, because it moves with your visit mix, your platform and how much of the check your patients complete themselves, so those hours have to be sized against your own schedule rather than a published average. And no dollar value for a dropped telehealth slot appears anywhere above, since the per-visit figures in circulation have no traceable source. Your contracted rate is the only input that belongs in that calculation. No savings percentage against in-house staffing appears here either, for the same reason.
Where the budget question is settled and a shortlist comes next, see our ranking of telehealth virtual assistant companies.
Start with a two-week working trial on your pre-visit checks.
