Last updated: 2026-09-08
The hourly rate an orthopedic clinic pays for a sports medicine virtual medical assistant is the simple half of this question, and it sits between $10.00 and $12.65. Harder is what drives the monthly bill up or down, because scope moves it further than the rate does. Underneath both sits a counting problem, which is how many imaging authorizations sit behind one sports medicine clinic day. Football season moves that count, and it moves twice a year rather than once. Buying cover before the injury peak, rather than during it, is the timing decision most orthopedic practices get backwards. Where every figure on this page comes from is set out at the end.
Honest Taskers charges $10.00 to $12.65 an hour for a sports medicine virtual medical assistant, and where a candidate lands inside that band follows their healthcare background, the schedule you need covered, the scope of the role and their location. Billing runs hourly with no weekly minimum. An orthopedic clinic buying 18 hours pays for 18 hours, not for a block it has to fill. Nothing gets added for payroll taxes, health insurance, paid leave or desk space, because you're buying hours instead of employing a person.
Two schedules cover most orthopedic clinics. Twenty hours a week works out to roughly $800 to $1,012 a month, and forty hours a week to roughly $1,600 to $2,024. Neither number carries a recruiter fee, a signing bonus or a severance risk. Practices that outsource one queue rather than a whole desk start at the lower figure.
Set that against payroll. US medical secretaries and administrative assistants earned a median $45,930 a year (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics", May 2025), and employer benefits add 48.7% on top of wages once paid leave, insurance, supplemental pay, retirement and legally required contributions are counted as separate components (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Employer Costs for Employee Compensation", March 2026). One in-clinic administrative seat runs near $68,252 a year before a computer or a square foot of space. Staffing companies price against that number, and our wider guide to how much a virtual medical assistant costs breaks the comparison down across roles.
Another two costs sit outside that annual figure. Filling the seat costs an average $5,475 per hire for non-executive roles (Source: SHRM, "2025 Benchmarking Report"), and it lands again every time the seat empties. The second is ramp. A new front-desk hire in an orthopedic practice spends weeks learning which payers demand prior authorization for an MRI of the knee and which wave it through, so they're slowest on the queue you hired them for. Hourly staffing doesn't remove the ramp. It does mean you stop paying for it the week the arrangement ends.
Run the comparison on your own wage band rather than the national median. An orthopedic group in a coastal metro with a full benefits package sits well above $68,252, and a single-physician sports medicine practice in a small market sits below it. The gap between those two clinics is wider than the gap between $10.00 and $12.65.
Hours drive the bill, and scope drives the hours. A sports medicine assistant billed at $10.00 to $12.65 an hour costs what it costs, so the whole question is how many hours the work needs. Four queues decide that in an orthopedic clinic, and they don't grow at the same pace.
Four queues account for most of the hours an orthopedic clinic buys.
Durable bracing and orthotics push the bill in a way most clinics miss. A brace gets handed to the patient in your exam room and billed by a supplier who isn't you, so somebody has to chase the paperwork across two organizations that don't share a system. Injection and procedure scheduling adds another block, since a joint injection needs a slot, a consent and sometimes its own approval. Post-operative follow-up runs on a fixed sequence, and every athlete who drops out of that sequence turns into a phone call.
The authorization load underneath all four is measurable, at least at the physician level. Practicing physicians reported an average of 40 prior authorizations a week, and 13 hours of physician and staff time spent on them, in the 2025 AMA Prior Authorization Physician Survey of 1,000 practicing physicians (Source: American Medical Association, May 2026). Sports medicine sits at the heavy end of that average because advanced imaging is the entry point to most of its care plans. Practices sizing the queue for the first time can start from our breakdown of how a virtual assistant handles prior authorization.
Volume discipline pushes the bill down. Consolidating the same task for the whole group beats spreading it across providers, because one person working every MRI authorization learns each payer's rules once instead of five times. Handing over a queue that's already written down cuts the ramp as well, and most orthopedic clinics keep the return-to-play form workflow in somebody's head rather than on paper. Get it on paper first.
No public dataset counts imaging authorizations per sports medicine clinic day, so the number you can act on is the one your own schedule gives you. Pull last month's MRI and CT orders, split them by payer, and mark which ones needed approval before the study could be booked. That count, divided by clinic days, is your figure. It's the only one that will survive an argument with your practice manager.
What makes the count worth doing is the shape of the delay. Advanced imaging is the choke point in sports medicine, because MRI and CT need prior authorization from most payers and the follow-up visit can't happen until the approval lands. A knee that's already swollen doesn't wait for a payer's queue. The athlete's timeline and the payer's timeline are different clocks, and the gap between them is where the cost sits.
Delay in an orthopedic clinic costs three separate things. The visit slot goes unused or gets rebooked, which is revenue you already staffed for. An athlete misses more of a season that has a fixed length, and nobody gets those weeks back. And the surgeon's decision sits frozen, since an operative plan without the scan is a plan nobody can sign.
A remote assistant works the mechanical part of that queue. Submitting the request with the right clinical notes attached, tracking the reference number, calling the payer when the portal goes quiet and telling your scheduler the moment an approval clears are all checkable clerical work with a defined end state. Judging whether a knee needs an MRI this week rather than next is not, and it stays with your physician. So does the decision to appeal a denial on clinical grounds, which rests on the record and the physician's reading of it, never on the assistant's. Clinics unsure whether the queue is big enough to hire against can size it with our list of signs your practice needs a virtual assistant.
Sizing matters more than speed at this stage. An orthopedic clinic that finds a handful of imaging authorizations a week has a part-time problem, and one that finds several a day has a full desk to fill. Both patterns are common in sports medicine. Only one of them justifies forty hours.
Yes, football season changes it, and it changes twice rather than once. Late summer brings the preparticipation physical surge, when whole teams need clearance inside a few weeks and the paperwork arrives faster than the visits do. Fall brings the contact-sport injury peak, which is a different workload entirely. One is volume against a deadline. The other is unscheduled, urgent and heavy on imaging.
Your calendar isn't the payer's calendar either. School and league schedules set the curve, so a clinic covering high school football feels August and September while a clinic covering youth soccer or club volleyball feels something else. Team and event coverage cuts the other way at the same time, pulling the physician out of clinic on Friday nights and Saturday mornings while the phone queue keeps filling. The clinic day gets shorter exactly when the inbox gets longer.
Hourly billing is what makes that curve affordable. The same assistant can work 15 hours in June and 30 in September without a hiring decision in between, and Honest Taskers bills hourly with no weekly minimum, so the hours follow the season instead of the contract. Ask any provider whether hours can move month to month and how much notice they need before they can. A weekly minimum or a flat monthly fee answers that question badly.
What moves into those extra hours is worth naming before the season starts. Preparticipation forms arrive as faxes and leave as scanned PDFs, and somebody has to route each one back to a school athletic trainer who's chasing dozens of them. Return-to-play clearance runs the same shape in reverse, with a clinical decision at the front and a document trail behind it. Workers' compensation cases layer on top, each one carrying an adjuster contact, a claim number and an authorization track that doesn't look like a commercial payer's. Deciding which of these move cleanly off a clinical desk is easier against our list of tasks to outsource to a virtual medical assistant.
One caution on the seasonal math. The curve differs by region and by sport mix, so a Texas practice sitting under Friday night football and a Minnesota practice sitting under hockey don't share a peak month. Build the staffing plan from your own last two years of visit counts, not from a national pattern. And leave the shoulder months alone until you've watched one full cycle.
Yes, buying it before the peak is worth more than buying it during one, because a queue handed over in a quiet month gets learned in a quiet month. Most placements complete within one to three weeks of a signed agreement at Honest Taskers. Add the ramp on top, and a clinic that starts hiring in week one of the season is still training somebody in week four. Starting in the off-season means the same person is useful on the first Monday that matters.
Three things make a first engagement a fair test of sports medicine support.
Compliance settles the same way at 15 hours as at 40. A Business Associate Agreement gets signed before anyone reaches protected health information, staff are HIPAA-trained under a dedicated HIPAA compliance officer, and Honest Taskers has its HIPAA compliance verified by Accountable. Honest Taskers describes its security posture as SOC 2 audit ready and doesn't claim a completed certification. None of that gets cheaper by buying fewer hours, which is worth knowing before a practice talks itself out of a small first engagement.
Continuity matters more here than in most specialties, because the payer rules for advanced imaging live in one person's head after a few months. Honest Taskers reports 99.6% average monthly retention, and recruits in the Philippines, Latin America, India and Pakistan, with professionals working the client's US time zone. Say up front that you need Friday afternoon and Monday morning coverage, since that's when a sports medicine queue breaks. Practices new to the model can start with our explainer on what a virtual medical assistant is.
Move to full time when the part-time hours run out of work, not when the trial feels good. Clinics that add hours on enthusiasm end up paying for capacity nobody uses in February. And the trial should tell you something narrower than whether the person was pleasant. Check whether imaging approvals landed before the follow-up slot, whether the clearance forms went back the same day, and whether your surgeon's Monday looked different.
Honest Taskers rates and terms come from the company's own published rate card, which sets the range at $10.00 to $12.65 an hour, bills hourly with no weekly minimum, and carries a two-week working trial on the first selected professional. Wage and employer-load comparisons come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, using the "Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics" release for May 2025 and the "Employer Costs for Employee Compensation" series for March 2026, with the load applied as separate components so paid leave and legally required contributions aren't counted twice. The prior authorization workload figures come from the 2025 AMA Prior Authorization Physician Survey, published in May 2026 and based on 1,000 practicing physicians.
Three limits belong on this page. No published figure exists for how many imaging authorizations one assistant clears in a day, so every number in that section points back at your own schedule rather than at a published average. The seasonal curve differs by region and by sport mix, which makes a national pattern the wrong basis for a staffing plan. And an assistant never judges clinical urgency, never decides on clinical grounds that an appeal is worth filing, and never advises an athlete about their injury. Those three stay with the physician, and no hourly rate changes that.
No savings percentage appears anywhere above. The honest comparison is the one you build from your own wage band, your own authorization volume and your own season, and the figures here are the inputs rather than the answer.
Once the budget question is settled, our ranking of sports medicine virtual medical assistant companies compares providers side by side.
Start with a two-week working trial on your imaging authorization queue.
