6 signs you need to automate your healthcare practice

Let’s run an experiment: if you catch yourself doing any of these six things over the next week at your clinic, put a 1 in your phone’s Notes app and count up the 1’s you got at the end of the week. Divide the result by 2 and you will roughly get the number of hours you could be saving each week if you introduced just a touch of automation to your practice.

So here we go, the six signs you need to automate your practice:

1. You copy-paste.

If your fingers reach for Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, this means either of these two things: 1) the systems you use in your clinic are so siloed that you have to transfer data manually, or 2) you are doing something very repetitive (like sending a pre-treatment prep reminder to a patient) that you are basically no more than a brainless set of fingers at that moment. Remove the Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V key bindings from your computer settings, you shouldn’t be needing them!

2. You touch the keyboard.

I’d even go as far as to say that if you do a task on a computer (invoicing, updating EMRs, scheduling, inventory management) - chances are, a computer can learn to do it without your involvement. It would take either describing the task as a set of rules and steps or transferring your unstructured knowledge to an AI agent to orchestrate computer commands in a flexible way.

3. It happens regularly.

Every day, every week, every month — the more often something happens, the less it should involve you.

Counting inventory, sending reminders, reconciling payments… these aren’t noble battles of endurance. They’re signals that you’re wasting precious hours on repetition instead of on growth.

4. You can explain it to your friend.

If you can tell your friend exactly how you do it — “First I open Excel, then I copy the numbers, then I print…” — congratulations, you’ve just described a perfect automation candidate. I could never describe my dentist friend how to build a web application or she, how to fill a cavity, with the same ease.

That’s because this task that you are doing is simple, clearly defined and does not require a ton of underlying knowledge. And anything that follows clear, repeatable rules can be delegated to a workflow, a script, or a bot.

5. It’s error-prone.

If you often catch yourself thinking “Wait, did I already send that?” or “Why doesn’t this number add up?”, you’re living proof that humans aren’t meant to handle tedious data.

Mistakes don’t make you bad at your job — they just mean your brain has better things to do. Automation doesn’t get tired, distracted, or interrupted mid-task.

6. You often forget to do it.

If something keeps slipping your mind — follow-up messages, reorders, feedback requests — that’s not disorganization; that’s biology. Your brain isn’t designed to juggle a hundred small, low-priority tasks while also caring for patients and running a business.

Let software do the remembering. Let it send the reminders, the reorders, the nudges. Because if you need a Post-it to remind you to do it, that Post-it should probably be an automation.

Bonus: you work more than 60 hours a week.

I get that you are a doctor and that running a private practice is tough, but I guarantee you that if you work more than 60 a week, one of these two things is true: you are either receiving patients back to back from 8 am to 8 p.m. five days a week (in which case, fair enough, if quality of care doesn’t suffer, I guess) or you are doing unnecessary work that can be delegated to a computer.

The takeaway

The best thing is that you don’t need expensive software or a full IT team to start automating.

Sometimes, all it takes is recognizing that you need it. You tell your patients to seek treatment when they feel sick, right? Well, this is me telling you that you need to implement some software and automations if any of these six signs is true for you.

That’s because staying sick means wasting hours every week, and “healing” means not only claiming this time back, but also making sure tasks are never forgotten or done wrong again and having the capacity and the infrastructure to expand your practice.

So.. how did that experiment work out for you?