Zedmed Virtual Assistant: a VA who works the recall list and the bulk bill batches, never the clinical record

Nobody searches “zedmed virtual assistant” for fun. You search it because the recall list is longer than it was last month, there is a pile of returned Medicare exceptions nobody has touched, and the receptionist who actually knew her way around Zedmed just gave notice. That last part is usually the moment a practice manager starts looking for help that does not have to sit at the front desk to be useful.

Zedmed has a screen for nearly every admin job a general practice has ever invented. The Appointments grid for the book. The Recall and Action lists for follow-ups. Online Claiming that talks straight to Medicare and DVA. A reminder cycle for the funded preventive work. The screens were never the bottleneck. The hours to work them were.

What a remote VA buys you is someone who lives in the Office side of Zedmed all day, every day: the book, the recalls, the batching, the reminders, the correspondence queue. Not the Clinical module. That stays exactly where it belongs.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your Zedmed

The morning starts with a pass over the Appointments grid. Reschedules processed, cancellations backfilled, new patients booked with their demographics entered properly the first time: Medicare number, DVA details, concession status, contact number all captured clean and validated through Medicare’s online eligibility check rather than typed in a hurry and fixed three rejections later. Each doctor’s column gets kept true, so the session a GP opens matches the day they were promised.

Then recalls, with the division of labour exactly where your accreditation surveyor wants it. Your doctors review results and record a recall or an action against them. That is where your VA starts, never earlier. They work the Recall list: send the contact by SMS or letter, log every attempt, book the appointment, and when a patient goes quiet, move them through the next round by status per your written protocol. The VA never opens a result and never decides what one means. Execution, never interpretation, the same line our medical practices page holds and the same line that keeps your recall system defensible at accreditation.

Then the money work, which is where a Zedmed VA earns their hours fastest. Bulk bill, DVA and ECLIPSE batches built and transmitted through Online Claiming, then the claim responses and processing reports reconciled daily so payments and rejections get worked while the claims are still warm instead of becoming end-of-quarter archaeology. The exceptions are where the real value sits: invalid Medicare or DVA card numbers corrected in the patient’s record, rejection reason codes triaged and resubmitted, and anything touching an item number flagged to the doctor with the code attached. Write-offs and accept-the-shortfall calls queue for your sign-off. The VA processes the claim; the item number stays a clinical and billing decision that never moves to them.

Weekly: the reminder cycle. Care plan reviews, health assessments, immunisations and overdue follow-ups pulled by reason and date range, sent in bulk through your approved SMS and letter templates, so the funded recurring work that quietly keeps a general practice afloat stops depending on whoever happened to remember. The templates get maintained too: confirmation wording kept current, two-way SMS replies monitored and actioned against the book, every send logged so the communication trail stays audit-ready.

And the correspondence queue. Inbound results and incoming letters get triaged to protocol: non-clinical correspondence filed where your rule says it goes, while every clinical result and letter is allocated to the treating doctor’s inbox for review. The VA files admin. Doctors file medicine. The line does not blur because the permissions do not let it.

The honest bit

There are a few things Zedmed genuinely will not do, no matter who you hire, and it is better you hear them now than discover them in week two.

If you are on the on-premise version of Zedmed, there is no browser login to simply hand a VA. They reach your Zedmed the way your doctors do from home, through secure remote access into your environment, and standing that up is an IT job before it is a hiring job. Quick if you are hosted with an IT provider or already running remote access for after-hours work, slower if the server is the box humming under the front desk with nothing set up. We do not start until the access is secure and the VA is on their own named login. If you are on Zedmed Cloud, this largely evaporates, it is a browser session, but plenty of established practices are still on the server build, and pretending otherwise would not survive one conversation with your IT support.

Second, Tyro and the EFTPOS terminal stay at the front desk. Patient claims where the cardholder physically taps or assigns the benefit, and any over-the-counter payment, happen where the patient is standing. A remote VA can prepare the invoice and reconcile afterwards, but they cannot be the hands at the terminal, and we will not pretend they can.

Third, the waiting room itself. Arriving patients, handing over forms, the physical front-of-house, that is not a remote job, and a Zedmed VA does not replace your desk person. They take the load off them: the chasing, the batching, the recall admin, the data entry, the work that does not need a face in the room.

What stays with you

Consultation notes, scripts, reviewed results, item-number selection and My Health Record. Item selection in particular is a clinical and compliance decision that never moves to the VA, no matter how billing-heavy the scope gets: the VA processes and resubmits claims, but which item number applies stays with the doctor. The notes part is not a policy we wrote on a slide, it is enforced by Zedmed itself. The Clinical module is switched off on the VA’s login, so progress notes, prescribing and reviewed results are not just discouraged, they are unavailable. The VA works the Office side, the doctors own the Clinical side, and My Health Record access stays off for every medical placement, full stop.

Anything a patient says that sounds clinical, any ambiguous recall, any rejection that touches a billing judgement, escalates straight back to the practice under a written rule. The VA’s standing instruction is to flag and wait, never to guess.

What it costs and where to start

Zedmed admin runs at the admin tier rate of $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST, billing-heavy scopes where the VA owns the full claiming cycle at $18-25, typically 15-20 hours a week, more where the VA also picks up front-of-house enquiries and overflow calls. That is roughly $1,000-1,700 a month for the book, recall chasing, batching, reminders and the correspondence queue worked properly. Placement runs 7-10 business days, with 5-7 days supervised inside your Zedmed before any solo work, a 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and no lock-in beyond 14 days notice. The $500 deposit is refundable and comes off your first month.

The medical practices page covers the industry side, including the My Health Record line and the accreditation framing, and the VA cost guide breaks the pricing down properly. If you are weighing Zedmed against another system, the BP Premier page walks the same workflow on that platform. Otherwise book a discovery call with Jenn. She takes every one herself, she has placed 87+ VAs into Australian businesses since 2024, and if your practice is not ready for one yet she will tell you before you have spent a dollar. Bring your recall list count and your stack of unworked exceptions: that is almost always where the first fifteen hours live.