Last updated: 2026-09-27
A geriatrics practice runs on coordination, so the honest first question is how a geriatrics virtual medical assistant stacks up against in-house staff before any budget changes. The limit comes first, meaning the bedside and mobility duties that remain with in-house geriatric staff whatever else moves. From there the Medicare care-coordination tasks that pass to a virtual medical assistant come into view, and they're a longer list than most practices expect. Chronic care management outreach is one, run as monthly check-in calls under provider supervision. Annual Wellness Visit prep is another, with the health-risk paperwork and caregiver check-ins that fill a coordinator's week. Money enters next. What an in-house geriatric care coordinator costs per year, once the employer load is added, sits well above the salary line, while what a geriatrics virtual medical assistant costs is an hourly rate carrying no load. Speed matters too, so which option restores care-coordination capacity quicker gets a direct answer. After that comes how a practice should weigh remote against in-house support, when it runs both together, why dropped polypharmacy follow-up endangers frail patients, and which sources back these staffing cost figures.
A geriatrics virtual medical assistant handles the coordination and paperwork side of the practice remotely, while in-house staff hold everything that needs a person beside the patient. The difference isn't skill or seniority, it's location. Geriatric care generates an unusual amount of administrative work per patient, because each older adult often carries several chronic conditions, multiple specialists, a caregiver, and a stack of Medicare documentation. That volume is what makes the split worth drawing. Tasks living inside your EHR, phone system, and payer portals can move to a remote professional at an hourly rate. Anything needing hands, eyes, or physical presence stays where the patient is. Cost follows that line rather than setting it, so comparing an hourly rate against a salary tells you almost nothing until you know which column each duty falls in. The rest of this comparison draws that line, prices both sides, and shows where a practice runs them side by side.
In-house geriatric staff keep every duty that needs a body in the room, and that's the honest ceiling on the remote model. A geriatrics virtual medical assistant can't do any of the hands-on work an older patient depends on, such as the tasks below.
Where most of your 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 coordination and paperwork, which in geriatrics it usually is. Front-desk and clinical staff soak up that admin load because they're the ones present when a caregiver calls or a specialist's note lands, so it piles onto whoever happens to be nearest a desk. Naming that split on paper is the first time many practices see how much of it never needed the building.
Plenty moves once you sort by where the work lives, and in geriatrics that list runs long. A geriatrics virtual medical assistant can run Medicare Chronic Care Management outreach and monthly check-in calls as administrative support under provider supervision, prep Annual Wellness Visits and the health-risk-assessment paperwork, and coordinate care across a patient's specialists, such as cardiology and nephrology. Caregiver communication and scheduling sit here too, along with medication refill coordination and flagging polypharmacy concerns for provider review. Transitional care follow-up after a hospital discharge, appointment and transportation scheduling, prior authorizations, records requests, and portal management round out the set. These are the tasks a geriatrics practice can outsource without touching clinical judgment. One boundary holds across all of it: the assistant prepares, schedules, coordinates, and flags, and never gives clinical advice or makes a clinical decision. Write that line into the role from day one rather than settling it mid-engagement.
A virtual medical assistant runs chronic care management outreach by working a monthly call list the provider signs off on. The rhythm stays steady: pull the patients enrolled in Medicare's CCM program, place the monthly check-in call, ask the structured questions the care plan calls for, and log the conversation and minutes in the EHR so the time is documented for billing. Between calls, the assistant updates the care-plan draft, chases the referrals and tests the last call surfaced, and routes anything clinical to the provider. Nothing on that list is a clinical decision. When a patient mentions a new symptom or a medication problem, the assistant records it and hands it straight to the clinician rather than advising. For the wider set of duties that fit this model, see our rundown of tasks to outsource to a virtual medical assistant. That documentation discipline is where the CCM revenue holds up or leaks away.
A virtual medical assistant prepares an Annual Wellness Visit by doing the legwork before the patient arrives. That means sending the health risk assessment ahead of time, chasing the completed form, and loading the answers so the provider opens a chart that's already populated. The assistant reconciles the medication list on file, pulls recent results and specialist notes, and confirms which screenings are due under the visit's schedule. Caregiver check-ins run alongside. Many older patients lean on an adult child or a paid caregiver, so the assistant keeps that person in the loop on appointments, transport, and what to bring, and notes the questions they want raised. All of it is preparation and communication, never assessment. The clinician still conducts the visit and makes every call about the patient's health. What the practice gets back is a visit that starts with the paperwork done, instead of a provider hunting for a blood pressure reading from eight months ago.
Salary is only about two thirds of what an in-house coordinator costs once everything is counted. US medical secretaries and administrative assistants, the closest national wage anchor for this role, earned a median $45,930 a year (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics", May 2025, occupation code 43-6013). Employer load on top of that wage is set out as separate components below so nothing gets double-counted (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 |
Two costs sit outside that table. Filling the seat runs about $5,475 per hire for non-executive roles (Source: SHRM, "2025 Benchmarking Report"), and it lands again on every departure, with a full replacement costing roughly six to nine months of salary once lost productivity is counted. Equipment and workspace are the other, and those swing too widely between practices to carry a national number. Coverage is the quiet one. A single coordinator is one person, so when they're on leave the CCM calls and AWV prep either stop or fall on clinical staff, and the paid-leave line in the table doesn't price that gap.
A geriatrics virtual medical assistant costs $10.00 to $12.65 an hour, set by role, background, schedule, and location, and billed by the hour with no weekly minimum. At 40 hours a week that's roughly $20,800 to $26,312 a year; at 20 hours a week it's about $10,400 to $13,156. None of the employer load applies, because you're buying hours, not employing a person. No payroll taxes, no health plan, no paid leave, no desk. The part-time figure is the one most geriatrics practices underrate. Coordination work often doesn't fill a full week, yet an in-house coordinator is still a full-time hire, so the real comparison for a half-time load isn't $68,252 against $26,312, it's $68,252 against $13,156 for the same output. Work the math on your own wages rather than trusting either figure, and price only the hours that move. For a fuller breakdown of the rate, read our guide to how much a virtual medical assistant costs.
The remote option restores capacity quicker, and usually by a wide margin. Most Honest Taskers placements complete within one to three weeks of a signed agreement, and the first professional comes with a two-week working trial, so a practice can test the fit before committing further. Recruiting an in-house coordinator in most US markets takes longer than that just to fill the seat, and onboarding runs on top, while the backlog of CCM calls and prior authorizations keeps growing. Turnover is the other half of the timing. Honest Taskers reports 99.6% average monthly retention, and where a placement doesn't fit, the replacement runs through the same pool rather than a fresh hiring cycle you staff yourself. An in-house resignation restarts recruiting and the ramp from zero, and in geriatrics that gap shows up fast as missed follow-ups. That's the cost of the empty seat, and it's worth pricing whether or not it was budgeted.
Sort the open role into two columns before pricing anything, because the split decides more than any rate card. Put every task that needs someone physically with the patient in the first column. Everything that needs only access to your EHR, phones, and payer portals goes in the second. Then run four tests against those columns, in order, because each one can settle the decision on its own.
Where you're not sure the workload justifies either route, our guide to the signs your practice needs a virtual assistant helps size it first.
Most geriatrics practices that get this right end up running both, because the choice was never all-or-nothing. The pattern that works keeps in-house staff on the front desk, clinical support, and anything physical, then moves the phones, CCM calls, AWV prep, verification, and follow-up queues to a remote professional. That's augmentation, not replacement, and the first sign it's working is your existing team getting clinical hours back. Nobody gets displaced; the coordination queue simply stops landing on people hired for something else. Practices that struggle are the ones that shipped a whole role out instead of a queue, then found the on-site half uncovered. Watch for a clinical staffer or front-desk employee spending hours a day on portal work and phone tag that never needed the building. When that's the picture, you're paying a loaded salary for output an hourly professional could handle, and the on-site person can't get to the work only they can do.
Dropped polypharmacy follow-up endangers older patients because the risk sits in the gaps between visits, not inside them. A frail geriatric patient may take a dozen medications prescribed by several clinicians, and the interactions, duplications, and dosing problems surface between appointments rather than during them. When a refill check or a post-discharge call slips, nobody catches the duplicate blood thinner or the missed renal-dose adjustment until it becomes a fall, a bleed, or a hospital admission. Follow-up itself is administrative, meaning the call, the schedule, and the flag to the provider, so it's exactly the work that goes first when an overloaded in-house team runs short. That's the real stake in this staffing decision. A virtual medical assistant keeps the refill coordination and the check-in cadence running, and routes every concern to the clinician, so the provider's judgment reaches the patient on time. The assistant doesn't decide anything, and that boundary is what keeps the arrangement safe.
The wage figure comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics "Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics" program for May 2025, occupation code 43-6013, medical secretaries and administrative assistants, used as the national anchor for a geriatric coordinator role. Employer load percentages come from the same agency's "Employer Costs for Employee Compensation" series for March 2026, applied as separate components so paid leave and legally required benefits aren't counted twice. Cost per hire and replacement cost come from the Society for Human Resource Management "2025 Benchmarking Report". Honest Taskers rates come from the company's published rate card, not a third-party estimate. Every dollar figure here is a national median, so each one moves with your local wage band; run the stack on your own numbers before you decide.
Talk to Honest Taskers about which half of your geriatric workload can move.
