A complete beginner’s guide: How to start automating your medical practice

Do you want to save time, reduce manual work, and minimize billing errors in your healthcare practice? You're in the right place.

We're not here to explain the ins and outs of automation. If you want to learn more about how automation works, head to this article (and be sure to come right back afterward). 

This article will focus on how automation can attract new patients, retain existing ones, and enhance the patient experience. 

By freeing up your staff to spend more quality time with patients, automation leads to improved patient satisfaction, more referrals, and increased revenue for your practice. It's a win-win situation for everyone involved.

Practice automation, when done right, is all about reducing friction in workflows. 

Picture this: you and your staff are performing tedious administrative tasks. These tasks include manually moving data between systems and reformatting it using piecemeal tech. You’re doing work that smarter tech could do for you. 

These poor processes cause inefficiencies in your workflows. Friction is high, morale is low. Add to that information overload, and you’re being held back from doing what you’re best at: providing exceptional patient care. 

You don’t need us to tell you that reducing valuable time spent with patients decreases patient satisfaction, potentially leading to patients seeking medical care elsewhere. 

We promised a beginner’s guide to start automating your medical practice. So let’s get started. 

The first step is to identify where the main challenges are facing your practice.

For example, are you experiencing a wave of patients moving to alternative healthcare providers? Think about telehealth solutions or online options, too. Digital healthcare has opened the world to patients, and now they have a wealth of choices at their fingertips. 

To help you pinpoint the challenges causing your practice the most friction, consider whether you’re currently:

These are just a few ideas to give you a starting point. Now, take a moment and jot down the challenges you’re experiencing.

Depending on your challenges, listing them out gives you a clearer idea of the best way to introduce automation. For example, if tracking financial performance is a pain point, automating the process of consolidating and analyzing data sources is a great place to begin. 

Understanding your medical practice’s performance sets the stage for proactive steps forward. 

The next step is to map your friction by identifying every piece of technology that touches your main challenges. 

For instance, spending extensive time on billing and reimbursements is likely due to sourcing information from different systems. So you might currently need your EHR, patient intake systems, preauthorization, claims submission, and billing software to perform these tasks. 

Some challenges will invariably span multiple systems, and as a result, will be more implicated than others. The automation mindset requires you to ask yourself if there are areas where one system change could alleviate multiple points of friction. 

To analyze your processes and systems further, examine how many hours your practice spends each week on the following:

Tebra’s 2024 independent provider survey revealed that 61% of providers spend up to 19 hours on administrative tasks each week. 

From there, you may identify, for example, that your focus should be on getting reimbursed and paid faster. Other challenges you may also uncover during your measurements might be billing and insurance complexity for your patients. 

Other pertinent examples include:

Analyzing your data in this way helps you to set automation goals and focus your efforts on where automation can have the most impact. Once you have your numbers, consider how much time you could save by automating formatting, data transfers, and other routine tasks.

These everyday processes have little to do with patient care, so every hour you spend on one of the tasks above is an hour not spent with patients. You’re potentially missing out on 3 essentials: building patient relationships, providing the best quality care, and earning revenue.

So you now have a good idea of how much time you spend on various processes.

To make a more informed decision about where to start your automation journey, it’s helpful to compare the effectiveness of those processes against some specific KPIs. Measuring the quality of business outcomes your processes deliver against industry benchmarks is a quick indicator of what’s working well and where you should take immediate action.

Tebra surveyed more than 200 independent practices to create these benchmarks. This resource is incredibly useful for your practice to directly compare your success with your peers. 

Let’s explore a couple of industry benchmark examples. You can download the complete worksheet here. 

Analyze the minutes you spend on both collecting and entering patient data in your practice. Minutes per patient intake is the KPI for this example, and the industry average is 10 minutes. This detailed information gives you more clarity and may help you to identify if your patient intake is taking too long. Now, 10 minutes might not sound like a lot, but compounded, this workflow can seriously impact your time available for patient care. 

The next benchmark to look at is time spent in EHR. That’s the number of minutes per patient spent in documentation, patient history review, and ordering labs and prescriptions. The industry average is 16 minutes. The top performers from the survey of independent practices spend less than 5 minutes on EHR tasks. 

While it’s helpful to understand your performance against industry benchmarks and to think about solving your challenges holistically, the biggest influence on your automation journey should be: What do you want from the process? What are your goals?

Let’s say you’ve clearly identified that your medical clinic must spend less time clicking in your EHR. You had a feeling that this activity was a time-suck, and now you’ve seen the industry benchmarks, it’s a challenge you must address. 

To do this, check out the following example automation to help you solve this problem (along with some more beneficial examples). 

You’ve got several solutions for this particular challenge. 

Introducing automation can look like:

The industry average of staff hours spent on manual billing activities per provider is 10. Top performers among your peers spend less than 4 minutes per provider. On top of that, 70% of practices spend less than 10 hours per week preauthorizing procedures and verifying insurance.

If your practice is losing valuable time in this area, this is what you can do to automate billing and insurance:

10 to 15% of practices have outstanding balances that are over 120 days (within 1 year rolling). 

The following can expedite reimbursements:

Many tasks fall under the category of administration. 

Here are some examples of how to reduce the time you spend in this area:

Ensuring staff well-being is paramount, and smoothing routine processes can certainly improve morale across the board.

Here are some ideas for automating processes to make life easier for everyone:

If this area is currently a challenge for your practice, automation can help increase both your visibility and credibility:

This final example is where you can bring all your tools together into a uniform process:

After reviewing your challenges, you should end up with a clearly prioritized list of:

Consider ranking your goals and grouping them into categories: 1-year objectives, 3-year objectives, and 5-year objectives. 

For instance, if one of your main goals is to reduce billing and insurance complexity, you may decide to lean into automation for tasks like EHR, patient intake, and billing to reduce data transfer in year 1. A sensible progression would be planning to automate routine submission, ERA processing, and data formatting tasks performed by bots by year 3. 

Are you interested to see how efficient your practice is?

Take the efficiency quiz to find out. You’ll identify the most important areas to focus on to start thinking about automating your practice. 

Then go ahead and download The Ultimate Guide to Practice Automation. Or watch Tebra's webinar on practice automation to learn more.