50+ Tasks a Mental Health Virtual Assistant Can Take Off Your Plate

Most providers we talk to underestimate how many tasks a mental health virtual assistant can take off their plate. They usually think “answer the phones and schedule patients,” but stop there. In reality, nearly everything that is not seeing a patient or signing something under your license can be handled by the right person.

As an administrative professional in the mental health and healthcare field for many years I’ve touched on nearly everything from patient intake, prior auths, following up on denials, light marketing (like making a flyer or social media post to promote an event), managed the schedule, be gatekeeper for the provider (send away sales people and handle non-clinical issues), internal chart audits, and much more.

Below is a working list pulled from what mental health practices across the country actually hand off, organized by category. Use it as a starting point when you are deciding what to delegate. You do not need all of it on day one, and most practices grow into the list over time.

Table of Contents


Scheduling and calendar

  1. Schedule new clients and book initial consultations
  2. Reschedule and cancel appointments
  3. Pair new clients with the right clinician based on specialty, availability, and fit
  4. Send appointment reminders and confirm appointments 24 to 48 hours ahead
  5. Manage the waitlist and fill cancellation slots
  6. Manage your personal calendar and protect it from back-to-back overbooking
  7. Prevent double-booking across systems (EHR plus Outlook, Teams, or Google Calendar)
  8. Cancel and reschedule a full day of patients when you are sick or out

New patient intake and onboarding

  1. Send intake paperwork and new client packets through your EHR
  2. Check that intake forms are completed before the appointment and follow up if not
  3. Send patient portal links and walk patients through accessing the portal
  4. Help patients download and set up the telehealth app or browser link
  5. Complete forms on a patient’s behalf and upload them when they need the help
  6. Run a brief needs assessment and route new inquiries to the right clinician
  7. Confirm a patient is a good fit before scheduling, or share your referral-out list when they are not

Phone, messaging, and front-desk communication

  1. Answer live calls and return voicemails the same day
  2. Monitor and respond to patient portal messages and emails
  3. Manage the shared admin inbox and reply to patient and therapist emails promptly
  4. Forward anything urgent or clinical to you, and handle the rest
  5. Act as a buffer so you are not pulled into every message while you are with patients
  6. Capture information from new inquiries so leads stop slipping to voicemail
  7. Text patients kindly about forms, payments, and reminders
  8. Provide after-hours or weekend intake coverage so you stop losing evening and weekend leads 

Insurance and eligibility

  1. Verify insurance benefits and update the chart with coverage details
  2. Handle prior authorizations
  3. Re-verify and update coverage when a patient’s insurance lapses or changes
  4. Request updated insurance cards and load them into the system
  5. Explain copays, coinsurance, deductibles, and secondary insurance to patients
  6. Flag network gap exceptions and authorization codes that need to be applied manually 

Billing and payments (front-end)

  1. Collect copays, coinsurance, and outstanding balances through your EHR
  2. Submit clean claims inside the EHR once everything is verified
  3. Send superbills to self-pay and out-of-network patients
  4. Set up and monitor booking deposits and card-on-file authorizations
  5. Check the next day’s appointments to confirm payment has been received
  6. Send friendly payment-reminder texts and walk patients through paying online
  7. Generate weekly or monthly invoices, including passing through credit card fees where allowed
  8. Spot obvious billing errors and flag them for review 

Prescriptions and clinical coordination (non-licensed)

  1. Log and queue refill requests for your review instead of actioning them
  2. Check whether a patient is due for an appointment before a refill moves forward
  3. Coordinate refills and follow-ups with pharmacies, and call pharmacies on your behalf
  4. Coordinate lab orders and upload labs, outside records, and referral letters into the chart
  5. Track and follow up on pending forms like FMLA paperwork and school notes 

EHR and records management

  1. Day-to-day data entry and chart management
  2. Assist with data migration when you switch EHRs
  3. Confirm notes are signed and locked at the end of the day (the administrative check, not the clinical work)
  4. Audit charts for missing claims, invoices, or unbilled sessions so you can see your true backlog
  5. Build and maintain SOPs and workflow docs as they learn your practice, kept free of PHI 

Retention, reviews, and growth

  1. Re-engage no-shows and lapsed patients
  2. Follow up on website, Psychology Today, and referral inquiries that you never get to
  3. Respond to positive reviews and flag negative feedback for you to handle
  4. Track where referrals are coming from 

Practice operations

  1. Keep track of insurance contract renewals and renegotiation dates
  2. Track CEU deadlines and business license renewals
  3. Coordinate with your billing company and act as a second set of eyes on their reports
  4. Help set up and test phone systems, intake packets, consent forms, and templates before launch
  5. Basic social media posts, LinkedIn updates, and keeping online profiles current 

Reporting and metrics

  1. Tally weekly and monthly patient and visit metrics
  2. Run and summarize billing and denial-rate reports so you can spot problems early
  3. Pull simple monthly marketing and referral analytics


What a general assistant is not the right fit for

There are a few things that fall outside what a general healthcare assistant should own. These need a specialist or your license:

  • Specialized medical billing including coding, working denials and rejections, and filing appeals. A VA can flag a denial and learn your common reasons over time, but ongoing denial management belongs with a dedicated biller.
  • Credentialing and re-credentialing with insurance panels.
  • Anything requiring your clinical license or clinical judgment.
  • Full creative marketing and campaign management, which is usually a different skill set and a different person than a patient-facing assistant.

If your practice has real billing complexity, the right setup is usually a general admin assistant plus a dedicated medical biller, or your assistant working alongside the billing company you already use.


How to actually get started

The single biggest predictor of whether this works is not the task list, it is documentation. Pick the handful of tasks above that are eating the most of your week right now, write a simple SOP for each one, and send it to your assistant a few days before they start. Walk through it together on day one, record the walkthrough so they can refer back to it, and set a short weekly check-in. Practices that do this ramp up fast. The ones that try to wing it struggle.

Want help figuring out which of these to hand off first, or who would be the right fit for your practice? Reach out and we will walk through it with you.

Ashleigh Atuahene is co-founder of Ataraxis. Before building the company, she provided one-on-one ABA therapy under a licensed therapist and spent years in healthcare administration, handling patient intake, scheduling, prior authorization, insurance, and documentation across pediatric, internal medicine, and behavioral health practices.

Ashleigh Atuahene - Success Story Profile Pic