How Many Admin Hours Does An Allied Health Practice Run? Nobody Is Counting The Ones That Could Move.

An allied health practice runs more admin hours than anybody has counted, and almost all of them sit in eligibility checking, referral chasing and claim correction. The MBS changes that started on 1 November added four new phone items for chronic condition management plans. Not one of them pays for the work a plan creates at the other end.

Which is the shape of nearly every change this sector gets.

The 1 November update priced the plan and left the practice admin where it was

MBS Online lists what commenced on Sunday: four new phone attendance items, 92033, 92034, 92063 and 92064, “for chronic condition management”, covering an attendance to prepare or review a plan. Alongside them a Medicare Healthy Kids Check for three-year-old children, introduced under the Thriving Kids initiative to improve early identification of developmental delay and neurodevelopmental differences.

Read that second one as a referral pipeline. Developmental delay identified at three likely means speech pathology, occupational therapy or psychology, booked by somebody at a front desk.

The clinical hour has an item number. The hour that gets a child through your door does not. We put the role-mapping version of this up when the NDIA announced a December rise for home supports, and this is the arithmetic underneath it. Outstaffer employs practice administrators for Australian providers, so read Employer of Record as disclosure rather than pitch.

What the rules make you check before every single appointment

Two things, and neither of them lives in your own system.

Services Australia’s billing rules for chronic condition allied health items state that eligible patients “can use up to 5 services per calendar year”, taken as one type or a mix. The same rules require a plan prepared or reviewed in the last 18 months, and a referral from a GP or prescribed medical practitioner.

So before a booking, somebody establishes how many of those five the patient has already spent elsewhere, and whether the plan is still inside its window. A patient who saw a physiotherapist in March and a dietitian in June arrives with two of the five spent and no reason to know it. Check your own billing position with your adviser before relying on any of this.

How many admin hours does an allied health practice run on that alone?

Here is the arithmetic, and the assumption inside it is mine rather than a published figure. Take a practice booking 40 chronic condition referred appointments a week. Allow six minutes each for the eligibility check, the referral chase and the rejected claim that follows whenever the count was wrong. Four hours a week. 208 hours a year, and not one of them carries an item number.

Set that against what an hour of back office admin actually costs and the line stops being invisible.

What happens to the checking in January?

The cap resets at once, for everybody. It runs on the calendar year, so every eligible patient becomes checkable again on 1 January and the practice re-establishes the position on all of them.

Nobody counts allied health admin hours, and that includes this post

No published Australian figure counts practice administration hours, which is why the six minutes is an assumption and is labelled as one.

The nearest thing that exists is a software company’s survey of its own customers. Zanda Health’s 2026 allied health report, published in September from 682 practitioners, found 18.6 per cent spend nine or more hours a week on documentation, and 47 per cent say documentation has grown over three years. Real numbers, and the wrong ones for this question: they count clinical notes written by the practitioner, which cannot move anywhere, drawn from one vendor’s user base. The administrative layer was measured by nobody.

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Count them before January counts them for you

The MBS update and the NDIA’s December repricing both priced a clinical hour and left the administrative one alone. Two for two is not yet a pattern, and it is not a coincidence either.

So count yours. If the number is uncomfortable, run one administrative role through it and read what it costs.

How many admin hours does an allied health practice run that nobody in your waiting room would ever need to see performed there?