Gentu Virtual Assistant: a medical secretary one browser login away

Two kinds of people search “gentu virtual assistant”. The first has just moved, or is about to move, from desktop Genie to Gentu, because Magentus (the group Genie Solutions became part of in 2023) is steering its specialist practices toward the cloud product, and the migration has surfaced every admin job the old secretary used to absorb invisibly. The second set up on Gentu from day one, usually a newly private specialist, and has discovered that a browser-based appointment book still needs a human being sitting in it. Either way the maths is the same: Gentu bills itself as Australia’s most chosen cloud practice management for specialists, supporting 55+ specialties, and none of those specialties includes “person who chases referrals at 4:55pm”.

This page is about that person. Not the software decision, which you’ve already made, but who drives it once it’s yours.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your Gentu

The day opens in the appointment book, and because Gentu is a browser tab rather than a program on the front-desk PC, your VA opens the same book you do, from their desk in Manila, on your business hours. SMS reminders went out from Gentu the day before; the VA’s first job is the patients who didn’t respond, phoned before the day starts so a silent no-show becomes either a confirmation or a slot you can fill. Gaps get worked, theatre sessions and consulting sessions get kept apart, and a proper diary discipline means the list you walk into is the list you expected.

Referrals are the quiet money job. Gentu records the referral against the patient and flags when it has lapsed, but a flag on a screen has never once phoned a GP’s rooms. Your VA reads ahead of the book, spots the referral that will have expired by appointment day, and gets the renewal organised before the patient is sitting in front of you with a consult that can’t be validly claimed. New referrals landing electronically through your secure messaging feed get turned into registered patients the day they arrive, Medicare and fund details checked before the first visit rather than after the first rejection.

Letters run daily. Specialist rooms live or die on referrer correspondence, and the letter that goes back within the week is a referral pipeline; the one that goes back in six is an apology. Your VA types from your dictation against Gentu’s letter templates, sends electronically to the referrer, and files the incoming correspondence against the right patient so the queue never silts up. You still say every clinical word; they just make sure the words leave the building.

Then billing, which is where Gentu genuinely differs from the desktop world. Medicare and DVA claims queue as they are billed and transmit automatically overnight, so the job is no longer transmitting batch by batch; the job is feeding the machine and catching what it spits back. Your VA receipts daily so the pipeline keeps moving, and works the exceptions: the claim that rejected on a lapsed referral, the fund claim that bounced on a detail a two-minute check would have caught, the outstanding account that needs a polite phone call rather than another statement. For proceduralists, theatre and in-patient invoices get built from the item numbers your op note confirms and submitted direct to the health funds through Gentu’s ECLIPSE claiming, with statuses tracked and rejections brought back to you with the paperwork already assembled, the same week they bounce instead of the same quarter.

Weekly, the accounts pass: batch remittances from Medicare, DVA and the funds reconciled against the right invoices, the aged list reviewed, and a short summary to you of what’s outstanding, what’s rejected, and what needs a decision only you can make. The medical billing task page covers that workflow in more depth if the money side is your main reason for reading.

The honest bit

Three things worth knowing before you hire anyone into Gentu, VA or local.

First, Gentu is the younger product. Genie has had thirty years of specialist secretaries demanding features; Gentu is leaner by design, and practices coming off a long Genie tenure sometimes find a report or a deep customisation they leaned on works differently in the cloud product, or isn’t there in the same form. A good VA works with the tool you actually have rather than the one you remember, but we won’t pretend the adjustment is zero.

Second, automated claiming automates transmission, not judgement. The background Medicare and DVA processing is genuinely good, and it is also exactly the kind of automation that lulls a practice into not watching the rejection queue. The claims that fail still fail quietly, and unworked rejections age into write-offs at the same rate they always did. The value of a VA in Gentu is less about sending claims and more about being the person who never stops watching what came back.

Third, cloud cuts both ways. There’s no server in the back room to nurse, no remote-desktop gymnastics to get a VA in, and Magentus carries the hosting with MFA built in and ISO 27001 certification behind it. But if your internet is down, so are your rooms, and no staffing arrangement changes that. Worth saying plainly because nobody’s brochure will.

What stays with you

Everything clinical, everything priced. Item number selection, fee setting, informed financial consent amounts, and the clinical content of every letter are yours; the VA assembles, transmits and chases, and never decides. Gentu’s role-based accounts make that a permission rather than a promise: the VA works on their own named login, scoped during onboarding to the admin side, with the clinical record configured out of reach. Anything a patient says on the phone that sounds clinical gets escalated to you under a written rule, not answered on the spot. And you remain the biller of record on every claim the system sends; the VA keeps the pipeline honest, you own what’s in it.

What it costs and where to start

Gentu admin sits on the admin tier at $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST; an experienced medical secretary who runs the full billing cycle, ECLIPSE rework included, is specialist-tier at $18-25. Solo specialists usually start at 10-15 hours a week, roughly $500-1,100 a month, and busier procedural rooms hand over more. Placement runs 7-10 business days, the first 5-7 days are supervised inside your Gentu before anything runs solo, the $500 deposit is refundable and credits your first month, and every placement carries a 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee with no lock-in beyond 14 days notice.

If you want the wider industry picture, the medical specialists page covers referral-driven rooms properly, and the VA cost guide breaks down the rates against local hiring. Otherwise book a discovery call with Jenn, who takes every one herself and has placed 87+ VAs into Australian businesses since 2024. Bring your rejected-claims list and your unsent-letters count; between those two numbers is usually the whole business case.