Practice Operations

How Much Is Admin Really Costing Your Practice?

Most healthcare practices know admin is a problem. Phones ringing all day. Inboxes overflowing. Invoices waiting to be chased. But the real question is: how much is this actually costing your practice in lost clinical time and revenue?

It’s one thing to feel the pressure. It’s another thing to see the numbers.

That’s exactly why we built the Radmin Edge Cost Savings Calculator – a simple way for New Zealand healthcare practices to estimate the financial impact of admin, and the potential upside of handing that work to a virtual medical assistant.

In this post, we’ll walk through:

• Where admin time hides in your week
• Why “we’ll just hire another admin” isn’t always the best answer
• How to turn admin into a clear dollar figure
• How to use our calculator to model savings for your own practice

The Hidden Cost of Admin in Healthcare Practices

For most practices, admin is not just a “support task” – it quietly shapes the entire day:

• Practitioners getting pulled out of consult notes to answer “quick questions”
• Clinicians staying late to clear inboxes
• Admin staff juggling phones, payments, recalls, and scanning all at once

On the surface, this is “just part of running a practice”. Underneath, it often means:

• Fewer appointments per day than your capacity allows
• Delayed follow-ups, because admin simply can’t keep up
• Burnout for both clinicians and admin staff
• Lost revenue, because clinical time is being spent on non-clinical work

The real issue? Most practices never stop to quantify it. The admin burden is felt, but not measured.

Where Admin Time Hides in Your Week

If you asked your practitioners, “How many hours do you spend on admin each week?” you might get a rough guess.

When we break it down with practices, admin is usually hiding in:

• Email
  Triage, routine responses, chasing forms, replying to simple queries that could be templated or delegated.
• Phone calls
  Appointment requests, rescheduling, script questions, “just checking” calls from patients, and coordination with other providers.
• Scheduling and calendar management
  Fixing double bookings, managing waitlists, rebooking no-shows, and trying to keep session times optimised.
• Payment follow-up
  Calling or emailing patients about outstanding invoices, reconciling payments, and chasing overdue accounts.
• Records and documentation
  Scanning, uploading, correcting details, and keeping everything organised for compliance and reporting.

Individually, each task might only take a few minutes. Across a week, for a whole team of practitioners, it quickly becomes hours and hours of lost clinical capacity.

“We’ll Just Hire Another Admin” – Why It’s Not Always the Best Answer

The natural response when admin becomes overwhelming is to think:

“We just need another admin person.”

Sometimes that’s true. But it’s not the only option – and not always the most cost-effective.

With a traditional hire, a practice needs to think about more than just the base salary:

• Employer costs (ACC levies, KiwiSaver contributions, etc.)
• Annual leave and sick leave
• Recruitment cost and time
• Training and onboarding
• The risk of turnover and having to repeat the process

You’re also limited by the fixed capacity of one person. If your admin demand spikes or your practice grows, you’re back at the same question: Do we hire again?

Virtual support gives you a different lever to pull:

• You only pay for defined hours and a clear scope
• You avoid payroll, leave, and recruitment overheads
• You can scale up or down more easily as your practice needs change

But again, the real question remains: Does this make financial sense for our practice?

Turning Admin into a Number You Can Actually See

To make a good decision, you need to move from “admin feels heavy” to “admin is costing us about $X per year”.

The basic idea is simple:

• Estimate how many admin hours each practitioner spends per week
  (For example: 3–6 hours per week is very common once you add up email, calls, and follow-up.)
• Multiply that by the number of practitioners
  That gives you a weekly total of practitioner time spent on admin.
• Apply your average clinical hourly rate
  What is an hour of clinician time worth in your practice?
• Annualise it
  Multiply by 52 weeks to see the annual value of practitioner time currently swallowed by admin.

At that point, you have a number that’s no longer a feeling – it’s a real, approximate financial impact.

From there, you can start asking:

• If we freed even part of this time, what could our practitioners do instead?
• Does a virtual medical assistant package represent good value against that number?

To make that process easier (and much quicker), we turned it into a simple online tool.

Introducing the Radmin Edge Cost Savings Calculator

The Radmin Edge Cost Savings Calculator is built specifically for New Zealand healthcare practices.

In around a minute, you can:

• Select your practice type (GP, physio, dental, specialist, etc.)
• Enter your number of practitioners
• Estimate how many admin hours each practitioner spends per week
• (Optionally) add your current admin staff monthly cost

From there, the calculator estimates:

• Total practitioner hours recovered annually if admin is delegated
• The clinical value of those hours
• A recommended virtual admin package based on your admin hours
• A comparison between virtual admin support and a full-time hire
• Your net annual savings after the cost of a Radmin Edge package

It’s not about giving you a perfectly precise number – it’s about giving you a clear, realistic range so you can make better decisions.

You can try the calculator here:
https://www.radminedge.co.nz/pages/savings-calulator

A Quick Example: What the Calculator Might Show You

Every practice is different, but here’s a common pattern we see:

• A group practice with several clinicians
• Each practitioner spending a few hours a week on admin
• A sense that “we’re busy, but we’re not sure exactly where the time goes”

When you plug those numbers into the calculator, you might see:

• Practitioner time equivalent to hundreds of hours per year tied up in admin
• The clinical value of that time comfortably exceeding the cost of a virtual admin package
• A clear indication that Comprehensive or Premium admin support would allow practitioners to focus far more on patient care

The calculator doesn’t tell you what to do. It simply makes visible what was hidden – so conversations about support and capacity can be based on data, not just frustration.

What To Do With Your Results

1. Sense-check the admin hours

Ask your clinicians:

“Does this feel accurate for how much time you spend on admin?”

Often, the discussion itself reveals more detail:

• “I actually spend more time in email than I realised.”
• “Phone calls during clinic are what really disrupt me.”

You can always re-run the calculator with refined numbers.

2. Consider where you want to free time first

Not all admin tasks are equal. You might decide to target:

• Email triage and routine responses
• Scheduling and follow-up
• Payment and invoice follow-up
• Records digitisation and organisation

This helps shape the scope of virtual admin support, so you’re investing where it matters most.

3. Compare to your current setup

If you already have admin staff, your question might be:

• Do we support our existing team with virtual help?
• Can we reduce pressure and burnout without immediately hiring more staff?
• Can we extend coverage (e.g. for calls or follow-up) without another full-time role?

If you don’t have dedicated admin staff yet, the calculator helps you see whether starting with virtual support is more cost-effective than a full-time hire.

When a Virtual Medical Assistant Makes Sense

A virtual medical assistant isn’t the right fit for every practice. It tends to work best when:

• You have multiple practitioners and admin is clearly getting in the way of clinical time
• Your existing admin staff are stretched, and you want to protect them from burnout
• You’re growing and not ready to commit to another full-time hire
• You want NZ-based, healthcare-specialised admin support without the overhead of recruitment, payroll, and training

At Radmin Edge, we focus solely on New Zealand healthcare practices. Our service is built around:

• Appointment management and scheduling
• Email triage and administrative responses
• Patient follow-up and coordination
• Payment follow-up and invoice support
• Records management and organisation
• Optional virtual reception services

And everything is delivered with Privacy Act 2020 awareness and healthcare-specific processes in mind.

How to Get Started

If you’re curious, you don’t need to make a big decision right away. A simple three-step path looks like this:

1. Run your numbers through the calculator

It takes about a minute: https://www.radminedge.co.nz/pages/savings-calulator

2. Note down anything that surprises you

Is the estimated clinical time recovered higher than you expected? Does the recommended package align with how your weeks actually feel?

3. Book a complimentary consultation with Radmin Edge

In 30 minutes, we can:

• Sense-check the calculator results
• Talk through your current admin challenges
• Outline what support could look like for your specific practice