Tyro Health Virtual Assistant: claims submitted, tracked and chased without you touching the portal

Nobody searches “tyro health virtual assistant” because claiming is going well. You search it because there are 14 claims sitting in the invoice list in some state other than approved, a WorkSafe invoice from five weeks ago that nobody has chased, and the person who was supposed to reconcile last month’s remittances is also the person treating patients all day. Tyro Health did its job: it got rid of the terminal. It did not get rid of the work.

That is the honest shape of digital claiming. Tyro Health Online (the platform that used to be Medipass) lets an Australian clinic claim Medicare bulk bill and patient claims, DVA, participating private health funds and WorkSafe or icare invoicing from a browser, plus NDIS plan-managed invoicing where your account has that newer feature enabled. Every one of those schemes still needs a person to submit, watch, chase and reconcile. This page is about putting a trained VA on that person’s chair for 10 to 15 hours a week.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your Tyro Health

Morning, first pass: yesterday’s claims. Everything your practitioners raised gets submitted through Tyro Health Online, bulk bill and patient claims to Medicare, DVA claims for veterans, fund claims where the patient’s fund participates in digital claiming. The point of the daily cadence is boring and important: claims submitted the next morning get paid on the scheme’s normal cycle. Claims batched up fortnightly because everyone was busy get paid late, and the practice quietly runs its own working capital as a loan to Medicare.

Second pass: the invoice list. This is the screen that tells you the truth about your claiming, and it only helps if someone reads it daily. Approved claims get noted for reconciliation. Pending claims older than the scheme’s normal turnaround get flagged. Declined claims get the real treatment: the VA pulls the decline reason from the invoice record, attaches the patient name, date of service and item detail, and sorts it into one of two piles. Admin errors, a wrong referral date, a patient detail mismatch, get corrected and resubmitted the same day. Anything touching what was actually delivered goes to the practitioner as a complete package, so fixing it takes them ninety seconds instead of a login and an archaeology dig.

Then the slow schemes. WorkSafe Victoria and icare NSW invoicing runs through Tyro Health for allied health providers, and both pay on their own timelines with their own approval quirks. The VA raises those invoices with the claim number and approval details attached, keeps a simple ageing view of what each insurer owes, and follows up the ones that have gone quiet. Same discipline for plan-managed NDIS invoices: raised with the participant number and support item correct, sent to the right plan manager, chased on a cadence you approve when payment stalls.

Weekly: reconciliation prep. Tyro Health’s remittance reporting shows what actually landed in your settlement account and when. Your VA exports it and matches it against the invoices in your practice management software, Cliniko, Splose and Nookal all integrate with Tyro Health, so what you get on Friday is not a spreadsheet dump but a short list: these claims were paid and are marked off, these were paid short, these are outstanding past the normal cycle, and here is what has been done about each. That weekly list is the difference between claiming that leaks and claiming that doesn’t. If your VA also runs the broader billing admin, the two jobs fold together naturally.

And the seam. If Tyro Health is connected to your PMS, the integration is where money goes missing: an invoice raised in Cliniko that never flowed into claiming, a claim approved in Tyro Health that nobody marked paid in the PMS, a duplicate because both systems raised the same invoice. Nobody owns the seam in most clinics because it belongs to two systems at once. The VA owns it.

The honest bit

Some things Tyro Health will not do, no matter who is driving it.

It will not fix a decline for you. Digital claiming means declines arrive faster, not less often, and a decline for eligibility, referral validity or item combination needs a human to read the reason and act. If nobody is reading the invoice list, Tyro Health is just a faster way to accumulate unpaid claims.

Not every health fund participates. Digital fund claiming through Tyro Health covers participating funds, and if a patient’s fund is not one of them, that patient pays in full and claims back with their fund manually. Your front desk still needs the two-sentence explanation ready, and a VA cannot make a non-participating fund participate.

Medicare patient claims pay the patient, not you. A bulk bill claim settles to the practice; a patient claim sends the rebate to the patient’s bank account after they have paid you. A VA keeps the two streams straight in reconciliation, but no amount of admin turns a patient claim into practice revenue that was not collected at the time of service.

The slow payers stay slow. WorkSafe and icare pay when WorkSafe and icare pay. What a VA changes is that the ageing gets watched and the follow-up actually happens, which in practice shortens the tail. What it does not change is the insurer’s clock.

And Tyro Health is a claiming platform, not a practice management system. Your appointment book, clinical notes and patient records live in Cliniko, Splose or Nookal. Tyro Health handles the money conversation with the schemes. A VA who only knows one side of that pairing is half a VA, which is why we scope both systems in the placement.

What stays with you

This is a health billing page, so the boundary gets written down, not implied.

Item number decisions are clinical decisions. What service was delivered, which MBS or DVA item describes it, what fee applies, whether a session meets the requirements of a care plan: practitioner, every time. The VA submits the claims practitioners have raised. When a decline suggests the item was the problem, it goes back to the practitioner with the decline reason attached; the VA never selects a different item and resubmits on their own judgement, because that path ends somewhere no clinic wants to be with Medicare.

Clinical content stays clinical. If a fund, an insurer or a plan manager asks a question that touches treatment, progress or clinical justification, the VA’s job is to route it to the practitioner with the context assembled, not to answer it.

Your money settings stay yours. The VA works from an invited user login under your Tyro Health business account. Settlement bank details, provider registrations and the Medicare Online provider agreements that connect your providers to Medicare stay under the administrator login you keep. That is a permission structure, not a promise.

Anything ambiguous escalates under a written rule agreed in week one. The default when unsure is always “ask”, never “resubmit and see”.

What it costs and where to start

Tyro Health claiming admin sits on the DotVA admin tier: $12-17 AUD an hour excluding GST. Most clinics run it at 10 to 15 hours a week, roughly $500-1,100 a month, usually bundled with the rest of the front-office admin in the same PMS rather than as a claiming-only role. Placement takes 7-10 business days. The first 5-7 days are supervised inside your actual Tyro Health and PMS accounts, starting with claim submission and the invoice list, with your declined-claim workflow reviewed by you before the VA runs it solo. A $500 refundable deposit credits against your first month, there is a 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and no lock-in beyond 14 days notice.

If you want the wider picture first, the allied health page covers what a clinic VA does beyond claiming, the physiotherapy page goes deeper on the physio-specific version, and the VA cost guide has the full pricing breakdown across tiers. Otherwise book a discovery call with Jenn, and bring your invoice list. The state of that screen is usually the whole conversation.