Shexie Virtual Assistant: a medical secretary for rooms that run on Shexie Platinum

Practices that run Shexie tend to have run it for a long time. Shexie has been building practice software in Sydney since 1994, Shexie Platinum sits in surgical and specialist rooms across the country, and the practices still on it are usually there by choice: the billing engine does exactly what a proceduralist needs, the theatre workflow is built in rather than bolted on, and it can run on your own server or in Shexie’s hosted cloud, whichever your practice picked years ago. The software is rarely the problem.

The problem is the person driving it. In most Shexie rooms the entire admin layer, appointments, theatre paperwork, ECLIPSE rework, receipting, dictation typing, sits with one secretary or practice manager who has held the role so long that nothing is written down. When that person resigns, takes long service leave, or simply hits the ceiling of a working week, the practice discovers how much of its revenue cycle lived in one head. That is usually the week someone searches “shexie virtual assistant”.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your Shexie Platinum

The day starts with the consulting book. Confirmations followed up, gaps in each session flagged, bookings checked against the right appointment type, location and length, because in a multi-site practice a patient booked to the wrong rooms is a small error on Monday and a wasted consult on Thursday. Where a referral is attached, its dates get checked too: the VA sweeps forward across the book for consults sitting on a referral that will have lapsed by the appointment date, then rings the GP’s rooms for a re-referral before the patient presents. A standard GP referral to a specialist carries the Medicare rebate for 12 months; an expired one means an awkward front-desk conversation or a rebate the practice quietly forfeits. Shexie records the referral and its dates. The phone call is a human job, and it is the VA’s.

Theatre days run on a longer cycle, and the discipline is in the case records rather than the printout. As cases book, the VA keeps each one complete inside Shexie: hospital, procedure, the item numbers you have billed, the patient’s fund details verified online before admission, consent and financial paperwork tracked back signed. Then the theatre list goes to the hospital days out, anaesthetist and assistant confirmed, and the patient gets a reminder sequence of their own with fasting and arrival instructions from your templates. Your registrar should never be texting a patient at 9pm about a 6:30am admission because the list was finalised the night before.

Then the money, which on Shexie is genuinely strong when someone has time to run it. Shexie Platinum lodges Medicare Online, DVA and ECLIPSE in-hospital claims electronically, and bills health funds under the no-gap and known-gap arrangements you have documented. The VA transmits claims once you have confirmed the items, watches what comes back, and reworks rejections in the week they bounce with the op report and fund details already assembled, instead of letting them age in a pile nobody opens. Patient gap invoices go out promptly and get followed up on a cadence you approve, payments are receipted daily, and the banking reconciles cleanly at month end. The full scope of what a VA can and cannot touch in medical claiming is mapped on the Medicare billing task page.

Letters round out the week. You dictate between patients; the VA types against Shexie’s letter templates, sends outgoing correspondence through your secure messaging provider, and files incoming results and letters to the right patient record. Referrers who receive a letter within the week keep referring, and for a specialist practice that single habit outperforms any marketing spend. Meanwhile the diary discipline underneath it all, confirmations, reminders per appointment type, non-responders phoned before they become no-shows, keeps ticking without anyone at the front desk carrying it.

The backlog that pays the invoice

Ask a Shexie practice where the money leaks and the answer is rarely the claims that went through. It is the ones that did not: the ECLIPSE claim rejected over a fund membership discrepancy six weeks ago, the DVA account that came back needing an amendment nobody made, the theatre case billed for the primary item while the assist component sat unlodged, the gap invoice the patient was definitely going to pay after settlement. None of these are hard individually. Each one is twenty minutes of pulling the op report, checking the fund details, correcting the account and resubmitting, and every one of them loses to a ringing phone when the same person is doing both jobs.

So the first fortnight of most Shexie placements is archaeology. The VA works backwards through the outstanding accounts and the rejection pile, oldest first, item by item, with a shortlist for you of anything that needs a provider decision before it can move. Practices are routinely surprised by what comes back from claims they had mentally written off, and once the pile is cleared, the weekly rework habit keeps it cleared. A rejection answered in week one is a resubmission; the same rejection found in month four is often a write-off with an apology attached.

The same discipline shows up at month end. Because receipting has been done daily and reconciled against the banking as it happened, the end-of-month picture in Shexie is a report you print rather than a puzzle you solve, and questions like “what did theatre actually bill last quarter” get answered from the software instead of from memory.

The honest bit

Three things worth saying plainly. First, direct Shexie experience is scarce offshore. Shexie’s install base is loyal but small next to the big allied health platforms, so most candidates arrive strong on Genie, Gentu or Clinic to Cloud rather than Shexie itself. The workflows transfer, specialist admin is specialist admin, but there is a learning week, and we would rather name it than sell around it.

Second, if your Shexie runs on a local server rather than the hosted cloud, remote access has to be set up before day one: a remote desktop or VPN session arranged with whoever manages your IT, the same access a secretary working from home would need. It is one conversation, not a project, but it is a real step that a browser-based system would not require.

Third, Shexie will not chase anything by itself. It records referral dates but does not ring the GP. It flags what is owed but does not follow up the gap invoice. It stores the theatre list but does not confirm the anaesthetist. Every one of those loops needs a person, which is precisely why they belong with a VA and not on a software wishlist.

And a fourth, smaller one: if your practice’s fee schedule, fund arrangements and chasing rules currently exist only in the head of the secretary who is leaving, the placement’s first job is writing them down. A VA can run documented rules relentlessly; nobody can run rules that were never recorded. We flag this on the discovery call when it applies, because pretending a new hire absorbs twenty years of undocumented habit by osmosis is how handovers fail.

What stays with you

The clinical spine of the practice never moves. Diagnoses, operative decisions, clinical documentation and anything a patient raises that sounds clinical escalate straight to you or your practice nurse under a written rule; the VA does not answer, ever. Item number selection stays with the provider, because assigning items is a billing judgement tied to your provider number, and fee decisions stay with the practice: the VA raises accounts from your documented fee schedule and fund arrangements, and anything outside them comes back as a question rather than a guess. Trust the security settings to hold the line on records: the VA’s Shexie login is scoped during onboarding to admin functions only, under their own username, so the audit trail of who did what in your system remains yours and remains true.

What it costs and where to start

Shexie admin work sits on the admin tier at $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST. A VA operating as a full medical secretary, owning the claiming cycle end to end, is specialist tier at $18-25. Most specialist rooms settle at 15-25 hours a week, roughly $800-1,800 a month at admin rates, covering the book, theatre admin, claiming and rework, receipting and letters. Matching takes 7-10 business days, the first 5-7 days run supervised inside your Shexie before anything happens solo, a 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee backs the placement, the $500 deposit is refundable and comes off your first invoice, and 14 days notice is the only exit condition.

For the wider picture of how specialist rooms use a VA, practice manager arithmetic included, start with the medical specialists page, and the VA cost guide sets out every rate and on-cost in one place. When you are ready, book a discovery call; Jenn has personally placed 87+ VAs into Australian businesses since 2024, takes every call herself, and will tell you honestly if a placement is not the right move yet. Bring two things: the rejected claims pile and the dictation backlog. Between them is almost always the business case.