Free practice audit
Nine questions about how your week actually goes. You get back a three-column board of what to hand off now, what to hand off once your rules are written down, and what should never leave your building, with the hours and the monthly cost attached to each.
HIPAA-compliant, BAA signed at the company level US-managed from Doylestown, PA In business since 2014
Nothing is sent anywhere until you decide to send it. If scripting is turned off, the full scoring table is published further down this page.
How the board is scored
Hand off now
A payer, a clearinghouse or HIPAA already defines the steps. The process rules travel with the task, so an outside assistant can run it in week one without you writing anything down. Prior authorization, eligibility, claims, AR and records requests all sit here.
Runbook first
Delegable, but your preferences define the steps. Your booking rules, your triage script, your provider templates. We build the runbook from your call recordings and existing SOPs during onboarding. That is a few hours of your time once, not a permanent blocker.
Stays with your team
Licensure, clinical judgment or internal management. Clinical triage, treatment planning, case review and staff management. No vendor should take these, and one who offers to is telling you something about how they operate.
One answer moves work between the first two columns: whether your front office is written down. Practices with documented SOPs can move everything delegable immediately. Practices where the process lives in the office manager’s head cannot, and pretending otherwise is how outsourcing engagements fail in month two.
Before you hire anyone
We sell people, so take this in the spirit it is offered. Three tasks on the list are things your existing software probably already does, and paying a human to do them is paying twice. Check these before you check our pricing page.
What to check: Real-time eligibility (the 270/271 transaction) is built into most practice management systems and clearinghouses.
What is left worth staffing: Staff the exceptions: plans your system cannot reach, benefit detail the response does not carry, and anything needing a phone call to the payer.
What to check: Electronic remittance (ERA, the 835 file) auto-posts most payments if your clearinghouse is configured for it. Many practices pay for this and never turn it on.
What is left worth staffing: Staff the reconciliation, the paper EOBs, and the denials that fall out of auto-posting.
What to check: Automated SMS and email reminders are standard in every major PM system and cut no-shows on their own.
What is left worth staffing: Staff the exceptions only: the confirmations nobody answered, the reschedules, and the patients who need a human call.
If your system already handles all three, you have just removed a meaningful slice of the load without adding a headcount. That is a better outcome than hiring us for it, and it is a faster one.
The full scoring table
The disposition shown is the default for a practice with patchy documentation. Written SOPs move every runbook-first row into the first column.
Read the hours as ranges, because that is what they are. These are planning benchmarks by practice type, not measured client timesheet data, and they are shown per provider per week unless marked as coverage, which scales with the hours you are open rather than with headcount. If one of them looks wrong for your practice, yours is the right number and ours is the wrong one. The section below this table tells you how to measure your own in a week.
| Task | Disposition | Lane and rate | Hours per week |
|---|---|---|---|
| Answering inbound patient calls Highest volume, highest interrupt cost to clinical staff. | Runbook first | Patient-facing, $10 to $13/hr | 2.5 to 4.5 hr/wk per provider |
| Scheduling and rescheduling Needs your provider templates and booking rules written down. | Runbook first | Patient-facing, $10 to $13/hr | 1.5 to 3.5 hr/wk per provider |
| Reminders and no-show follow-up A person should only work the exceptions your reminder tool misses. Check your software before you staff this | Runbook first | Patient-facing, $10 to $13/hr | 1 to 2 hr/wk per provider |
| New patient intake and registration Revenue-critical. Bad demographics here become denials later. | Runbook first | Patient-facing, $10 to $13/hr | 1.5 to 3 hr/wk per provider |
| After hours, evening and weekend calls Coverage, not headcount. Scales by hours open, not by provider. | Runbook first | Patient-facing, $10 to $13/hr | 3 to 6 hr/wk coverage, not per provider |
| Portal messages and patient inbox Non-clinical replies transfer. Clinical replies stay with you. | Runbook first | Back office, $8 to $10/hr | 1.5 to 3 hr/wk per provider |
| Prescription refill requests Delegable up to your standing orders. The approval stays clinical. | Runbook first | Back office, $8 to $10/hr | 1 to 2 hr/wk per provider |
| Task | Disposition | Lane and rate | Hours per week |
|---|---|---|---|
| Insurance verification and eligibility Run it 48 hours ahead of the visit. Verifying on the day of service is where the denials come from. Check your software before you staff this | Hand off now | Back office, $8 to $10/hr | 2 to 4 hr/wk per provider |
| Prior authorizations The single biggest recoverable block of provider time. | Hand off now | Back office, $8 to $10/hr | 2.5 to 6 hr/wk per provider |
| Claims submission and denial follow-up Hold it to two numbers: days to submit, and share of denials worked inside 14 days. | Hand off now | Back office, $8 to $10/hr | 2.5 to 4.5 hr/wk per provider |
| AR follow-up and patient collections Aged AR is the fastest place to show payback on a first hire. | Hand off now | Back office, $8 to $10/hr | 2 to 4 hr/wk per provider |
| Payment posting and EOB processing Check your clearinghouse for auto-posting before you staff this. Check your software before you staff this | Hand off now | Back office, $8 to $10/hr | 1 to 3 hr/wk per provider |
| Credentialing and payer enrollment Bursty work. Usually a slice of a seat rather than a whole one. | Hand off now | Back office, $8 to $10/hr | 0.5 to 2 hr/wk per provider |
| Task | Disposition | Lane and rate | Hours per week |
|---|---|---|---|
| Documentation and scribe support Needs per-provider templates and a shadowing period first. | Runbook first | Back office, $8 to $10/hr | 4 to 7 hr/wk per provider |
| Medical records requests and release The 30-day HIPAA response clock runs whether or not anyone is watching it. Someone has to. | Hand off now | Back office, $8 to $10/hr | 1 to 2 hr/wk per provider |
| Referral coordination Depends on your referral network and your specialists preferences. | Runbook first | Patient-facing, $10 to $13/hr | 1 to 3 hr/wk per provider |
| Lab and imaging result routing Routing and chasing transfers. Interpreting never does. | Runbook first | Back office, $8 to $10/hr | 1 to 2 hr/wk per provider |
| Task | Disposition | Lane and rate | Hours per week |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recall and lapsed patient outreach Usually the first thing dropped when the front desk is underwater. | Runbook first | Patient-facing, $10 to $13/hr | 1 to 3 hr/wk per provider |
| Review responses and reputation Templated replies plus your escalation rule for anything negative. | Runbook first | Back office, $8 to $10/hr | 0.5 to 1.5 hr/wk per provider |
| Outbound campaigns and payer lists Project work. Staff it in blocks rather than permanently. | Runbook first | Patient-facing, $10 to $13/hr | 1 to 4 hr/wk per provider |
| Task | Disposition | Lane and rate | Hours per week |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clinical triage of symptom calls Licensure. An assistant can take the call and route it, never assess it. | Stays with your team | Not delegable | 1 to 3 hr/wk per provider |
| Staff scheduling, payroll and HR Internal management. Delegating it outward costs you the culture. | Stays with your team | Not delegable | 1 to 3 hr/wk per provider |
| Treatment planning and case review Clinical judgment. Not delegable at any price. | Stays with your team | Not delegable | 2 to 4 hr/wk per provider |
What to do Monday
Our benchmarks are a starting point. Yours are the real thing, and getting them costs you four small tasks and one week of nobody changing their behavior. Do this before you talk to any vendor, us included. It is the difference between buying a staffing plan and buying a guess.
Pull the call report from your phone provider for the last full month: total inbound, answered, abandoned, and average time to answer. Almost every VoIP system has this and almost nobody looks at it. Abandoned calls are the cleanest revenue proxy you have.
Pick the single task that feels worst, usually prior authorization or the patient inbox. Have whoever does it log start and stop times for one week. Do not estimate from memory. Estimates from memory are the reason most staffing plans are wrong.
Total AR, then the 90-plus bucket as a share of it. If the 90-plus bucket is over 20 percent, AR follow-up is your highest-payback lane regardless of what the rest of this page says.
Take the task from step two and write the steps as bullet points. Thirty minutes, no formatting, no polish. If you can produce that, the task can move out of the runbook column immediately. If you cannot, you have found the real bottleneck and it is not staffing.
At the end of the week you will have four numbers: abandoned calls, hours on your worst task, your 90-plus AR share, and whether you can write a process down. Those four decide the staffing plan. Everything above this line is scaffolding to help you find them.
Common questions
Start with work a payer or regulator already defines: insurance verification, prior authorizations, claims and denial follow-up, AR follow-up, and medical records requests. The process rules travel with the task, so an outside assistant can run it in week one without you writing anything down. Prior authorization is usually the single biggest recoverable block of provider time.
Anything requiring licensure or clinical judgment. Clinical triage of symptom calls, treatment planning, case review, and the final approval on a refill all stay with your clinical team. Internal staff management, payroll and performance conversations should also stay in house. A vendor who offers to take these is telling you something about how they operate.
Ask who owns the rules. If a payer, a clearinghouse or HIPAA defines the steps, the task is delegable today. If your own preferences define the steps, the task is still delegable but it needs a runbook first. That is a few hours of your time once during onboarding, not a permanent blocker. Only licensure and clinical judgment make a task genuinely undelegable.
HelpSquad engagements start at 20 hours a week on a three-month initial term, then roll three months at a time with 30 days notice. Most practices are better served starting with one lane at 20 to 25 hours and expanding once it is running quietly than by staffing four lanes at once.
Back-office work such as billing, claims, AR, data entry and scribing runs $8 to $10 an hour. Patient-facing work such as front desk, scheduling, intake and calls runs $10 to $13 an hour. Three or more assistants with a team lead, QA and a trainer is priced as a managed team. Every tier includes a dedicated account manager and a HIPAA-compliant virtual desktop with a signed BAA, with no upfront cost, no implementation fee and no charge to replace a bad fit.
Yes, when the vendor is set up as a business associate. HelpSquad signs the BAA at the company level rather than with the individual assistant, and assistants work inside a HIPAA-compliant virtual desktop so patient data never lands on a personal machine and access can be revoked centrally.
They are planning estimates, not measurements. Hours are benchmarked per provider per week against typical load for each practice type, then scaled by your provider count and adjusted upward when you report heavy unanswered call volume. Treat the output as a starting point for a conversation rather than a quote. Your own numbers will always beat a benchmark.
A 30-minute call. No sales pressure. We'll tell you honestly whether we're a fit.