Straight answer first. A clinically-trained virtual assistant can take almost the entire prior authorization workflow off your desk: the submission, the payer follow-up, the status chasing, the appeal paperwork, the documentation-gathering. That leaves you only the clinical decisions that actually require a physician. What it can't do is make the medical-necessity call or sign what needs your license. Everything between those two points is delegable, and that "between" is where nearly all the time goes.
And it is a lot of time. By the AMA's own prior authorization surveys, a physician's practice completes on the order of 45 prior authorizations per physician per week, and physicians and their staff spend roughly the better part of two business days a week handling them. That's not a rounding error in your schedule. That's a standing tax on every clinical hour, paid mostly in staff time and after-hours catch-up.
Where prior authorization time actually disappears
The medical-necessity judgment, the part only you can make, takes seconds. The rest is process, and process is where the hours live:
- Figuring out whether a given drug, imaging study, or procedure even needs authorization for that specific plan.
- Assembling the clinical documentation the payer wants, in the format the payer wants it.
- Submitting through whichever portal or fax workflow this insurer insists on this month.
- Following up. Then following up again. Then sitting on hold.
- Handling the denial: reading the reason, gathering what's missing, filing the appeal or the peer-to-peer request.
- Tracking every open auth so nothing falls through and delays a patient's care.
None of that requires a medical degree. All of it requires judgment: knowing which documentation actually supports medical necessity, recognizing why a denial happened, understanding what a clean submission looks like. That's the catch. It's not clinical decision-making, but it is clinical literacy. Hand it to someone without it and you get incomplete submissions, more denials, and a queue that quietly boomerangs back to you.
Why a nurse clears prior auth faster than a generalist
This is the exact place where "just get a virtual assistant" quietly fails. A general VA can fill in a portal and chase a status. But when the payer asks for the clinical rationale, or a denial turns on a documentation nuance, a generalist has to escalate, and the escalation lands on you. A virtual assistant for prior authorization who is a registered nurse reads the chart, knows which notes support the request, understands why a denial came back, and assembles the appeal without routing it through your inbox first.
That's the whole reason we place nurses and not generalists. The prior auth queue isn't clerical work with a medical vocabulary sprinkled on top. It's clinical literacy applied to a bureaucratic process. The person working it either has that literacy or they keep handing the hard ones back to you, which is the opposite of relief.
What stays with you
Honesty matters here, because overpromising on prior auth is how practices get burned. A clinically-trained MVA does not make the medical-necessity determination, doesn't practice medicine, and doesn't sign what requires your credential. What they do is everything up to and after that decision: teeing up the submission so your part takes seconds, and carrying it the rest of the way once you've made the call. You go from owning the whole process to owning only the judgment, which is the only part that was ever really yours to own.
Pair that with the rest of the documentation load, the inbox and the chart prep and catching the AI scribe's errors, and the compounding effect is your evenings back, not just a shorter auth queue.
Related: How to Hire a Medical Virtual Assistant · How to Reduce Charting Time · What Makes an RN Virtual Assistant Different
FAQ
Can a virtual assistant handle prior authorizations?
Yes. A clinically-trained one can own the full workflow: determining whether auth is needed, gathering documentation, submitting, following up, and handling denials and appeals. The physician keeps only the medical-necessity decision and any signature that requires a license.
Why hire a nurse specifically for prior authorization?
Because the work turns on clinical literacy, meaning knowing which documentation supports medical necessity and why a denial happened. A generalist escalates those calls back to you. A nurse resolves them.
How much prior authorization time can I realistically get back?
Most of it. The submission, follow-up, status tracking, and appeals are all delegable. By the AMA's surveys the process consumes the better part of two business days a week per physician, and the majority of that is process, not clinical judgment.