These 9 manual tasks are secretly costing your medical practice 10 hours a week (so you should automate them)

Some admin work, like invoicing or filling out patients’ EMRs, is openly boring and frustrating and pushes individual practitioners and small clinic owners to find solutions to streamline them.

These 9 tasks, however, are the things I see every single doctor-preneur do on a weekly basis with an air of calm resignation, convinced that these are just part of the game if you want to run your own private practice.

But these 9 tasks are the silent killers of your time, stealing ~10 hours a week from you: the 10 hours that you could spend receiving more patients or spending with your family if you automate them!

Let’s see what they are.

1. First up, inventory management. Automatic inventory management is not something only large hospitals do and it doesn’t have to rely on big expensive software. A few smart hacks using free software are enough so that your supply of medications, consumables, and the possible products you sell at your clinic, are recalculated automatically after each procedure and purchase. You could program the system to send you an alert when you are running low or even have it send an order to your supplier automatically.

   
   

2. Shifting gears to patients now: let’s talk about sending post-procedure care guidelines.

   Sending copy-pasted messages like “Avoid heat exposure and bending down in the next three days” to your patients after a procedure might be second nature to you by now. But pause and think: we are not woodpeckers going at a tree for hours at a time: we are intelligent creatures and should not have to waste our valuable cognitive resources on doing these repetitive tasks.

   
   

   Automate sending post-treatment checklists! And stop acting like a woodpecker.

   
   

   By the way, I’ve written a whole article about the 6 signs that a task should be automated - and copy-pasting is one of them. Learn about the other signs here: https://www.lazysilicon.com/post/6-signs-you-need-to-automate-your-practice

   
   

3. Same goes for appointment reminders and reschedule messages in case of no-shows: I think it’s self-explanatory that these should be automated as well!

   
   

4. This next activity doesn’t look as monotonous because it’s spread out over time, but it nevertheless must be automated. I’m talking about inviting patients to come in for follow-up appointments or repeat (e.g. annual) procedures. Automating this can not only unburden you, but also ensure this actually gets done, thus growing your revenue.

   
   

5. Another type of message doctors should be sending to their patients more often is asking for post-procedure feedback and a review. A simple “Hey, how are you feeling after the procedure we did two days ago?” can go a long way in building lifelong patient loyalty. And friendly requests to give overall feedback can help you collect those valuable reviews that you need for your website.

   
   

6. Speaking of your website: I’m sure you have FAQ sections with general questions (driving instructions, booking guidelines, etc) and with information specific to each procedure (how to prepare, what to bring, where to go, etc.) and I’m also sure patients keep calling, emailing and messaging you asking these same questions (or, worse yet, not following pre-treatment guidelines because they didn’t want to bother you with their doubts). An AI assistant enriched with your clinic’s knowledge is the right solution for this problem. It won’t get tired of answering the same questions, free your human colleagues and encourage patients to clarify all their organizational doubts before a procedure.

   
   

7. I am particularly passionate about this next one because it annoys me as a patient, on top of me as a software engineer and a healthcare management professional. It’s the 5-15 minutes the patient spends going through their anamnesis at the start of an appointment: either filling out a paper form or being interviewed by a medical professional. Medical regulation in many countries these days allows for this tedious act to be done digitally, by the patient in the comfort of their own home before the procedure. So why are we still wasting a large chunk of a visit’s time doing this?

   
   

8. Let’s switch gears and talk about what private practices need to do on a weekly basis from the business perspective: marketing. Whether it’s filming Instagram reels, contracting with influencers or placing Google ads, health business need to keep moving to stay relevant. While software - sadly - cannot yet automate content creation, it can take care of automatic video editing, thumbnail creation, post publication, description writing, ad keyword research and ad tagline generation, and even competitor and trend research. Less manual marketing management, more high quality content!

   
   

9. Treatments, inventory, accounting, bookings, marketing - you as a clinic owner have to juggle it all. But somehow, you also want to stay on top of the latest research in your specialty, latest medication launches, conference announcements and other trends in your industry, right? Luckily, AI these days can help distill the most relevant papers and news for you, so that you spend 10 minutes a week catching up with trends instead of two hours (or not doing it at all).

   
   

The message I’m trying to convey here is that you don’t have to struggle every week not knowing where you’ll find the time to manage your patients, your business and your private life. Let software help you: it truly doesn’t have to be complex, expensive or long to set up. And it truly will help you feel more energized and excited about going to work.