Last updated: 2026-09-08
Pricing scales off one input here, so the weekly hour count decides the bill and nothing else does. Ten hours a week is where most video programs start, and knowing what that block buys matters more than knowing the rate. Programs underestimate the hours a video schedule needs for a reason that shows up in the day-before contact rather than in the visit itself. Whether a longer commitment earns a lower rate deserves a direct question to any provider, and the honest answer here isn't the one most buyers expect. There's also a point where a second assistant beats more hours on one person's timesheet, and the shape of a telehealth day rather than the volume decides when you've reached it. Sources for the figures on this page, including the wage series quoted from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, sit at the end.
Telehealth virtual assistant pricing scales in a straight line at Honest Taskers, because billing runs hourly with no weekly minimum and the month's bill is hours times rate. Nothing else enters the calculation. No seat fee, no platform charge, no floor you have to buy up to before the first hour counts. The rate sits between $10.00 and $12.65 an hour, and where a placement lands inside that band moves with the candidate's healthcare background, the schedule you're asking them to work, the scope of the role and their location.
Four weeks to a month is the arithmetic behind every figure below.
Calendar months don't hold four weeks, though. A month with five billing weeks bills five, so a yearly budget built off the monthly figure runs light by roughly a month of hours across twelve. Quarterly budgeting sidesteps the problem, since thirteen weeks is thirteen weeks however the calendar falls.
Scaling by the hour rather than by package has one consequence worth naming. Adding five hours costs five hours, and dropping five costs nothing but the conversation, so a program that guessed high can come down without renegotiating a tier and a clinic testing video visits in one department can start below what any full-time-only vendor will sell. Broader budgeting for a remote administrative seat, including the parts that sit outside the hourly line, is covered in our guide to virtual medical assistant cost.
One more thing the hourly model changes is how a pilot ends. A program that stops after six weeks stops paying after six weeks, and that's a different risk than a minimum-term seat carries.
Ten hours a week buys one lane of the telehealth workflow done properly, and that's two hours a day across five days rather than a person on call. Scope it to a single queue before the first shift. A block that owns everything owns nothing, and the failure looks like a provider chasing consent forms at eleven while the assistant sits in a portal inbox.
Each of the following is a genuine ten-hour week for one person supporting a video schedule.
Two of those lanes rarely fit inside the same ten hours. Pre-visit checks are the heaviest, because a genuine check means reaching the patient rather than leaving a voicemail about a link. Time your own before you buy: call ten patients the day before, log the minutes from dial to confirmed camera, and multiply by next week's video visit count. Practices that run that arithmetic ahead of hiring end up buying twenty hours instead of ten more times than not.
Portal triage is the lane that gets mis-scoped the most, so write the boundary down before the block starts. Sorting a message into billing, scheduling or the clinician's queue is administrative work. Deciding what the message means clinically isn't, and no Honest Taskers professional performs clinical triage or judges whether a complaint belongs on video. Staff are HIPAA-trained under a dedicated HIPAA compliance officer, a Business Associate Agreement is signed before anyone reaches protected health information, HIPAA compliance is verified by Accountable, and the company describes its security posture as SOC 2 audit ready. The full task inventory a remote administrative seat can hold sits in our breakdown of virtual medical assistant duties.
Telehealth programs underestimate the hours because a video schedule looks lighter on paper than a clinic day and isn't. Twelve visits at twenty minutes reads as four hours of work. On paper there's no waiting room to manage, no rooming, no paper forms and no check-out desk. What that reading misses is that every video visit carries a contact the front desk never had to make when the patient walked through the door.
In person, the technical check happens by itself. The patient arrives, somebody hands over a clipboard, a medical assistant walks them to a room, and the equipment either works or a person in the building fixes it. On video, all of that collapses into a phone call the day before, covering whether the camera works, whether the app is installed, which device they'll use and whether they'll be somewhere private. Twelve visits means twelve of those calls, and the ones nobody reaches the first time mean more than twelve.
Reconnection is the second underestimate, and it's the unkind one, because the work lands inside the slot it's trying to save. A patient who can't join at 10:02 has to be called at 10:03, talked through the link and put back in the room before 10:20. Nobody scheduled those three minutes. They come out of whichever queue has no deadline attached to it, which means the recall list or the documentation backlog, and that's how a queue quietly stops moving while everyone reports a good week.
Rescheduling is the third. MGMA DataDive Practice Operations puts the single-specialty no-show rate in a range commonly cited as 5% to 8%, and a video schedule adds its own version on top of that, since a patient who joined, dropped and never came back is a call, a slot and a note. Counting contacts rather than visits is the fix, and it takes one afternoon with last month's schedule. What the count looks like once a program has passed what its current desk can absorb is set out in our rundown of the signs your practice needs a virtual assistant.
None of this argues for buying more hours than the schedule justifies. It argues for counting the right thing first.
No, a longer telehealth commitment doesn't earn a lower rate at Honest Taskers, because neither a volume discount nor a long-commitment discount appears in the published terms. The band is set by the role and the candidate rather than by the length of the contract. Billing stays hourly with no weekly minimum whether the arrangement runs two months or two years.
That's a plainer answer than most pricing pages give, and it cuts both ways. Signing a year up front won't produce a number below $10.00 an hour. Testing ten hours for a quarter carries no penalty for the short view either, which matters more than a discount would while the program itself is still an experiment.
Commitment length still changes something, just not the number on the invoice. A three-month arrangement gives a professional time to learn your video platform, your consent script and the four providers who each want the pre-visit call handled a little differently. Month one is training whoever you hire. Paying for that twice is the true cost of a short arrangement, and it never appears on a rate card.
What a longer arrangement saves is continuity, and continuity on a telehealth queue outweighs a rounding error on the rate. Patients on a video schedule recognize a voice before they recognize a practice. The person who called about the camera last month is the person who gets picked up this month, and a reconnection call answered in eleven seconds instead of going to voicemail is the whole argument for keeping one named professional on the queue. Honest Taskers reports 99.6% average monthly retention, which comes out of competitive pay, healthcare coverage for eligible team members, interest-free loans, wellness packages and yearly performance-based raises rather than out of luck.
Ask for the terms in writing anyway, and ask before the trial rather than after it. Most placements complete within one to three weeks of a signed agreement, a two-week working trial comes with the client's first selected professional subject to current service terms, and unlimited replacement support sits behind the arrangement, with performance-related replacements qualifying in some cases for a credit covering the replacement professional's first two weeks. Get the notice period, the billing cycle and the replacement mechanics onto the same page, since those three decide what a long arrangement costs you on the day it goes wrong. Anyone still settling what the role covers before pricing it can start with what a virtual medical assistant is.
A telehealth program should add a second assistant once the work sits at both ends of a day one person can't stretch across. That's the day-shape problem, and buying more hours doesn't touch it. Video demand clusters at the two edges, because patients book telehealth before work and after work, and the appeal of the format is not having to leave a desk or a house in the middle of the day.
Picture pressure running from seven to nine in the morning and from four to seven in the evening. Five hours of load, spread across a twelve-hour window. One person on a forty-hour week covers eight of those twelve, and whichever eight you pick leaves an edge uncovered. Lengthening that person's shift widens the day rather than the coverage, and a twelve-hour stretch isn't a job a strong candidate stays in.
Two part-time blocks fix what one long block can't. Ten hours on the morning edge plus twenty hours on the evening edge bills about $400 to $506 alongside about $800 to $1,012 a month, which is the same arithmetic as before, run twice. Both people work the client's US time zone.
Geography makes the same argument louder for a practice whose patients aren't local. A program with patients in more than one time zone has an evening in one place and an afternoon in another, so a single assistant on Eastern hours reaches the Pacific patient at lunchtime and misses the after-work window entirely. Honest Taskers recruits in the Philippines, Latin America, India and Pakistan, and professionals work the client's US time zone rather than their own, which lets a second seat be scheduled against the second edge instead of against a compromise.
Coverage is the other trigger, and small programs price it last. One person is one illness away from no telehealth support at all, and a video schedule notices inside a day, because the pre-visit calls stop happening and the drops stop getting rebooked. Two people at fifteen hours each cost what one at thirty costs, and they fail differently. Predictable blocks also attract stronger candidates than split shifts do, since two hours at seven and three more at five is a schedule few people will build a week around. Screening questions that separate a candidate who can hold a morning edge from one who can't are in our guide to how to hire a virtual medical assistant.
Honest Taskers rates, billing terms, trial terms, placement timelines, replacement support, recruiting geography and compliance posture come from the company's own published rate card and service terms. Every monthly figure here is arithmetic on that published hourly rate at four weeks to a month, so treat it as arithmetic rather than as a quote. Wage context for US front-office healthcare roles comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose "Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics" release for May 2025 puts median annual pay for medical secretaries and administrative assistants at $45,930, while its "Employer Costs for Employee Compensation" release records benefits adding 48.7% on top of wages for office and administrative support occupations in private industry (Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Employer Costs for Employee Compensation", March 2026). No-show context comes from MGMA DataDive Practice Operations. Nothing here draws on a client case study, and no savings percentage appears anywhere on the page, since that comparison belongs to your own payroll rather than to a headline figure. How many hours a program needs can't be read off this page or any other, because that number comes out of your own visit count and the shape of your own day, and no professional on any of these hours performs clinical triage or decides whether a visit should happen on video.
Once the hours are sized and a shortlist is the next job, our ranking of telehealth virtual assistant companies covers who sells them.
