Practice leaders know what they spend on salaries, technology, supplies, and facilities. What is much harder to see is what they spend on work that should not require so much human effort in the first place.
It is the employee who has to enter the same information in two places. The referral that needs another phone call because something was missing. The eligibility check that requires someone to leave one workflow, log into another system, and come back. The patient who calls again because a request is still waiting in a queue.
None of those activities looks especially costly on its own. That is precisely why the expense can be easy to overlook.
Across hundreds or thousands of interactions, a few unnecessary minutes become hours, and one extra touch becomes several. Work that appears to be simply part of running a practice begins consuming capacity that could be used for patients, growth, or more complex work.
For ambulatory practices operating with little room for waste, that hidden cost deserves more attention.
Start counting touches
When I talk with healthcare organizations, one of the things I encourage leaders to consider is not simply how many tasks their teams complete, but how many times people have to touch those tasks before they are actually done.
Take a routine process such as an authorization, referral, or scheduling request. How many people interact with it? How often does someone have to check its status? Does information have to be re-entered? What happens when something is incomplete? Does the patient eventually call because the process has stalled?
That is where the true cost of manual work begins to emerge.
According to the American Medical Association's 2025 Prior Authorization Physician Survey, physicians and their staff spend an average of 13 hours each week completing prior authorizations. Forty percent of physicians surveyed report having staff who work exclusively on prior authorization.
Not every administrative process carries that level of burden. But the example illustrates a broader point: administrative work has a cost even when it does not appear as its own line on a financial statement. The cost is embedded in people's time.
Rework costs more than the original task
Manual processes become particularly expensive when they create rework.
Every time information is incomplete, entered incorrectly, or transferred between disconnected workflows, someone has to resolve the problem. That may mean another message, another phone call, another review, or another handoff. The practice is effectively paying for the same work twice.
There can also be a compounding effect. A delay in one part of the workflow may generate a patient call. That call creates another task for the front office. A clinician may be asked for clarification. Another employee may need to check the status. What began as one small inefficiency has now consumed time across several roles.
Those costs are difficult to isolate because they are distributed across the organization. Yet they affect staff productivity, turnaround time, patient access, and ultimately financial performance.
They affect staff and patients, too. Employees who spend large portions of their day chasing information or correcting preventable problems have less time for work that requires their knowledge and judgment. Patients may not know why a process is inefficient, but they know when they have to provide the same information twice, make another call, or wait longer than expected for an answer.
The operational problem, the workforce problem, and the patient experience problem are often the same problem viewed from three different perspectives.
Automation should protect capacity
That is why I believe the most useful conversation about automation in ambulatory care is not about replacing people. It is about protecting their capacity.
There are tasks in every practice that require judgment, empathy, and expertise. There are also predictable, repetitive activities that consume hours without benefiting from having a person perform every step.
Routine information can be routed automatically. Missing information can be identified earlier. Eligibility can be checked without requiring the same sequence of manual steps. Reminders and status updates can happen without someone initiating every interaction. Work that needs attention can be surfaced to the appropriate person instead of relying on someone to continually monitor a queue.
In each case, the goal is not automation for its own sake. It is fewer unnecessary touches. That distinction matters because poorly designed automation can create its own burden. If a new tool automates one step but requires employees to monitor another system, review excessive exceptions, or correct unreliable output, the practice may simply have moved the work rather than eliminated it.
A better measure of success is whether the entire workflow becomes easier to complete.
Follow the friction
For practices wondering where to begin, I would not start by asking, "Where can we use automation?" Start by asking employees where they lose time.
Look for processes that require the same information more than once, queues someone has to continually check, tasks that generate callbacks or rework, and workflows employees describe as frustrating but unavoidable.
Those pain points can reveal opportunities that may not be obvious from a financial report.
From there, practices can establish a baseline by looking at how long the process takes, how many people touch it, how frequently it requires follow-up, and how much of the work actually requires human judgment.
Then automate deliberately, and measure again.
The gains may seem modest at first. A process takes a few minutes less. A staff member no longer has to check a status manually. A patient receives an update without making a phone call.
But that is the nature of both the hidden cost and the opportunity. They accumulate across the work a practice performs every day.
Reclaim the capacity you already have
Ambulatory practices continue to operate under significant financial and workforce pressure. Leaders cannot assume they can solve every increase in demand by adding another person or asking existing teams to work harder. That makes the capacity already inside the practice increasingly valuable.
When practices eliminate a redundant handoff, prevent rework, or automate a routine step, they gain something that may never appear as a single savings line on a financial statement. They gain time.
Repeated across a practice, that time can become greater staff capacity, faster patient follow-up, more consistent workflows, and more room for clinicians and staff to focus on the work only they can do.
In today's ambulatory environment, finding and eliminating those hidden costs is not simply an efficiency exercise. It is part of building a more resilient practice.
At Greenway Health®, this same thinking is behind Novare™, which uses AI and automation to reduce manual handoffs, rework, and administrative burden across ambulatory workflows, giving clinicians and staff more time to focus on patient care. Learn more about Novare from Greenway Health.
