Tips for Onboarding and Training Your Virtual Medical Assistant (VMA)
- Apr 14
- 6 min read
Hiring your first virtual medical assistant (VMA) can be a huge step toward improving efficiency in your practice. Many members of our online physician community reach a point where administrative tasks—emails, scheduling, insurance verification, billing follow-ups, social media, etc.—begin to eat into their clinical time. A well-trained virtual assistant can help offload those responsibilities, allowing you to focus on higher-value work. Successfully adding a new member to your staff, however, depends heavily on the effectiveness of your onboarding process. Every practice has a unique workflow that a VMA must plug into. Below are some practical tips to help you onboard your first virtual medical assistant effectively. Several of these tips can also be used for VAs in other settings, including those used as personal assistants.
Original material was contributed for this page by our partners at GSD Associates, who provide full- and part-time VAs to medical practices. PSG members receive 10% off their first year of service when they reach out for a no-commitment consultation through our partnership form.
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Practical tips for onboarding your first virtual medical assistant
The biggest mistake physicians make is treating a VMA like a self-service tool. They require onboarding, clear expectations, and structured feedback loops — especially in the first 30 days.
Clearly define the role you want your virtual assistant to have
Before onboarding begins, outline the specific tasks you want your VMA to handle.
Common tasks a VMA handles include:
Patient scheduling, rescheduling, and appointment reminders
Insurance verification and pre-authorization submissions
Referral coordination and follow-up
Medical record requests and documentation management
Patient communication (calls, portal messages, prescription refill routing)
Billing support: charge entry, claim follow-up, denial management
Prior authorization tracking
Onboarding new patients and collecting intake forms
Write out a simple job description and task list for this role so that your VMA understands what their responsibilities will be from the start. This can help prevent confusion during the onboarding process.
Document your workflows before the virtual assistant starts training
One of the most helpful things you can do when onboarding a VMA is to create simple documentation for repetitive tasks. These are often called SOPs (standard operating procedures).
If you or your team can’t describe how patient scheduling happens step by step at your practice, your VMA won’t be able to do it either. The act of documenting is clarifying.
This doesn’t have to be complicated. Even a basic checklist of steps can save hours of back and forth with your VMA.
As you put together your SOPs, consider compiling them (digitally is fine) into a mini operations manual to have for your staff to reference.
One of the easiest ways to put together this documentation is to have the person currently performing the task write down their process as they go through it, which helps prevent any missed steps (and the follow-up questions that often result) and captures habitual parts of the workflow. If you’re the one currently performing these tasks, you may wish to record yourself doing it and have one of your office staff turn that recording into written instructions to help save you time. Video step-by-step tutorials can also be helpful to give your VMA as part of their training.
Start your virtual medical assistant by training them on one or two focused tasks
Even if you want your virtual assistant to handle several aspects of your administrative workflow, don’t hand off everything on day one. Choose one or two core responsibilities that are your highest volume and most time consuming tasks and build from there.
High-impact tasks that virtual medical assistants often take on in private practice include:
Insurance verification and prior authorization
Patient scheduling & communication
Onboarding new patients
Billing support
Referral coordination
Once the assistant demonstrates they have a handle on the first couple of tasks, gradually add more.
This phased approach to onboarding helps prevent overwhelm and allows you to refine what’s working and what isn’t with internal processes before scaling responsibilities.
If you’ve been hesitant because you’re not sure where to start or what to expect — that’s exactly the problem a good VMA partner can help you solve.
Related PSG Resources:
GSD Associates (Get. Stuff. Done.) provides full and part-time nearshore Virtual Medical Assistants exclusively trained for physicians and private practices — handling HIPAA-compliant scheduling, insurance verification, billing support, referral coordination, and patient communications, with every VHA dedicated solely to your practice. Their assistants are bilingual (Spanish/English), work in US time zones, and bring real cultural fluency with staff and patients — at a fraction of domestic hiring costs. GSD goes beyond staffing with dedicated account management, performance analytics, and AI-powered knowledge base technology that makes their teams faster and more accurate. PSG members receive 10% off their first year of service — start with a no-commitment consultation today through our partnership form.
Edge Health provides college educated remote employees that work full time for your practice. They perform tasks such as primary or secondary phone support, billing, claims, insurance verifications, scribing, social media, and other tasks. Practices tend to use the services in multiple different ways. They are trained prior to starting in your office, and the cost is substantially less than what you would pay an in-house employee. To learn more about Edge's services and schedule a demo, and receive $500 off each of your first 3 months, connect through our affiliate link.
Provide your VMA access to your EHR (& other necessary technology)
Ensure your VMA has appropriate (and audited) access to your systems for their assigned tasks. Systems like Athenahealth, EClinicalWorks (ECW), and SimplePractice are designed to accommodate remote users.
Software your VMA may need access to includes:
Scheduling software
Secure email
Patient portal messaging system
Practice management software
You’ll want to ensure all systems use secure logins with role-based permissions and encrypted communications to align with HIPAA compliance. Your practice may wish to implement a password manager to share credentials securely.
Establish communication channels and a check-in rhythm
Because VMAs work remotely, your communication with them must be more intentional. Early in the onboarding process, decide:
How you will communicate with them (Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, etc.)
Your check-in frequency
Many physicians find even a 10-minute morning huddle, even if it’s asynchronous via voice message, can dramatically improve alignment. This is especially true for the first few weeks as the VMA becomes integrated into your practice.
Track performance metrics for your VMA from day one
Data lets you optimize the relationship over time.
Metrics to consider tracking include:
Calls handled
Insurance verifications completed
Denials worked
Referrals followed up on
Encourage your virtual assistant to ask questions or provide feedback
As your virtual assistant gets plugged into the day-to-day operations of your practice, they may notice inefficiencies or opportunities for improvement that you and your clinical staff haven’t considered. Encourage them to ask any questions they have and suggest ideas for improvements. This can be especially beneficial to new practices that are working with a VMA that has experience with what has worked–and what hasn’t–for other practices.
A collaborative approach to working with your VMA can lead to:
Better patient communication processes (and patient satisfaction)
Reduced administrative burden for your entire team
Improved workflows
Conclusion
Physicians who successfully delegate administrative work consistently report lower burnout, more room for high-value activities (clinical or otherwise), and better practice finances. The best results come from a carefully thought out onboarding process. By clearly defining responsibilities, documenting your typical workflows, onboarding tasks in stages, and opening clear lines of communication, physicians can build a productive and long-lasting partnership with their VMA.
Related resources for physicians
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