A Cliniko virtual assistant is a trained administrative professional who runs your practice’s day to day operations inside Cliniko: appointment scheduling, patient records, treatment note processing, billing, waitlist management, recall campaigns and reporting. We have worked with Cliniko for over a decade, have apps published in the official Cliniko Extension Store, and provide dedicated Cliniko trained VAs from around AUD 1,500 a month.
If your practice runs on Cliniko and your practitioners are spending hours on admin instead of patients, here is how the arrangement actually works.
What a Cliniko VA handles
Appointment scheduling and management
Your VA manages the whole appointment lifecycle: scheduling based on practitioner availability, appointment type and patient preference; rescheduling and cancellations with the right patient communication; practitioner calendars across multiple rooms or locations; same day requests and last minute changes; utilisation monitoring with underbooked periods flagged; and online booking confirmations, including the conflicts they generate.
A good one does not just fill slots. They understand appointment durations, practitioner preferences and the shape of your day well enough to schedule intelligently.
Patient record management
Accurate records are the backbone of clinical administration: creating and updating patient profiles with correct contact details, referral sources and clinical information; keeping notes linked to the right record; processing referral letters and attaching them to files; maintaining emergency contact and consent documentation; running data quality audits for incomplete or stale records; and handling merges when duplicates appear.
Treatment note processing
This is where most practices lose the most time. After every appointment notes need processing, and your VA transcribes practitioner notes into Cliniko in the correct format, links them to the right appointment and record, flags anything needing practitioner review, checks them against your documentation standards, and works through the batch at the end of each session.
The line matters: the VA processes the documentation. They do not make clinical decisions about its content. Anything requiring clinical judgement gets flagged and escalated.
Billing and financial administration
Cliniko’s billing tools are powerful and time consuming to run by hand. A VA generates invoices against the correct service codes and fees, processes Medicare bulk billing claims through the integration, manages DVA submissions, handles private health insurance claims, chases unpaid invoices and outstanding balances, processes receipts and reconciles accounts, manages Workers Compensation paperwork, and produces the financial reports the owner actually reads.
Waitlist management
An underused feature that a dedicated person turns into a revenue driver: maintaining an active waitlist with patient preferences for days, times and practitioners; watching cancellations and contacting waitlist patients immediately to fill the gap; prioritising by urgency and booking history; and tracking conversion so you can see the fill rate rather than guess at it.
Recall campaigns
Recalls are among the highest return tasks a Cliniko VA performs: setting up and running campaigns for patients due for follow up, personalising communications by treatment type and history, tracking response rates and chasing non responders, managing schedules across treatment programs, and reporting on rebooking. Most practices know they should be doing this consistently and lack the admin capacity to execute it.
How our Cliniko expertise compares
| Capability | Yoonet | General BPO | Freelance VA |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cliniko specific training | Over a decade | You train them | You train them |
| Cliniko Extension Store apps | Yes, published | No | No |
| Pre trained VA available | Yes, via Clinic Admin | No | No |
| Allied health terminology | Podiatry, physio, EP | Unlikely | Varies |
| Security for health records | Office based, enterprise grade | Varies | Home based |
| Cover when your VA is away | Cliniko trained replacement | Untrained replacement | None |
Depth in a platform is not something that can be manufactured quickly. It comes from years inside it across hundreds of practices, knowing the edge cases and refining the workflows against real use.
The two paths, and what training each needs
Path A: a Yoonet VA, where you lead the training. Your VA arrives with general Cliniko competency from our training program, and you train them on your practice: your appointment types, documentation standards, billing codes, communication preferences and escalation protocols. Expect two to four weeks of active training, front loaded into the first week. They already know Cliniko navigation, general scheduling, record management, basic billing and standard reporting.
Path B: Clinic Admin, where the VA arrives pre trained. Clinic Admin is our dedicated allied health division. VAs come with Cliniko training tailored to your practice type, and the team, which includes nursing qualified support staff, handles the bulk of onboarding using workflows refined across hundreds of allied health engagements. You customise rather than build: practitioner preferences, non standard billing arrangements, your own templates and any unusual workflow requirements. It typically cuts onboarding from four to six weeks down to two to three.
How security works
Your Cliniko data is sensitive health information, so access is controlled tightly. Your VA works from a dedicated workstation in our secured office, two factor authentication is mandatory on the Cliniko account, access is restricted to the specific features the role needs using Cliniko’s own role permissions, and everything is logged and auditable.
The physical environment is the other half of it: no remote access to Cliniko, USB ports disabled so nothing can be copied to an external device, CCTV throughout the facility and biometric access at every entry point. Team members are trained on health data handling, with clear protocols for information that must never leave Cliniko, escalation procedures for anything that looks wrong, and regular compliance reviews.
You keep full administrative control of your account throughout. You set the permissions, you decide what the VA can and cannot reach, and you can revoke access instantly. The broader legal picture for offshore practice admin is set out in outsourcing practice admin without risking patient privacy.
What it costs
A dedicated Cliniko trained VA costs from around AUD 1,500 a month on Path A, and from around AUD 2,000 a month on Path B where the training comes built in. Both are fully loaded: salary, office infrastructure, security, management, IT support and Philippine employment compliance, with no setup or recruitment fees.
You provide a Cliniko licence for your VA, which sits on your own subscription. Everything else is included. For the full comparison against local hiring and other models, see our outsourcing cost guide.
Getting started
Week one is assessment: your practice, your Cliniko setup, your admin pain points, and whether a VA is the right answer right now. Some practices need to tidy their Cliniko workflows first, and we will say so.
Weeks one to two settle the path. If you have strong internal processes and a capable practice manager to direct the work, Path A is usually more cost effective. If you want proven workflows and pre trained expertise, Path B gets you operational faster.
Weeks two to three cover matching and access: we match you with a Cliniko trained team member, you set up their access with the right role permissions, and we configure the security protocols around it.
Weeks three to six are onboarding, with tasks ramping from simple, appointment confirmations and data entry, to complex, billing, recalls and waitlist management, as competence builds. From month two your VA runs the routine admin independently and escalates the exceptions, and your involvement drops to periodic check ins.
Want to see how this would work in your practice? Start with an assessment and we will review your Cliniko setup and give you a clear recommendation.

