RXNT Named to TIME World's Top HealthTech Companies of 2026 for Second Consecutive Year
Each task may seem harmless on its own, but multiplied across dozens of employees, patients, and workdays, those minutes can add up to hours of lost productivity.
Key takeaways
- Operational resilience depends on efficient workflows that can adapt to changing demands.
- Common practice time-wasters include repetitive manual work, disconnected technology, information searches, and task follow-up.
- Automation, integrated workflows, standardized processes, and staff input can help practices reduce unnecessary work.
The biggest drain on your practice doesn’t always show up with a dollar sign on a balance sheet. More often, the biggest drains show up in the hours your staff spends doing work that should take minutes.
Sometimes that looks like a few minutes searching for information or following up on an outstanding claim. Each task may seem harmless on its own, but multiplied across dozens of employees, patients, and workdays, those minutes can add up to hours of lost productivity.
Finding those hidden inefficiencies is key to building operational resilience. Here are four common time-wasters in medical practices and how to identify where your team may be losing time.
What Operational Resilience Means for Medical Practices
Operational resilience is the ability to maintain efficient operations despite disruptions, changing demands, or unexpected challenges. For a medical practice, resilience can mean maintaining consistent workflows when patient volume increases, staffing changes, new administrative requirements emerge, or other unexpected demands affect the practice.
Practices that regularly evaluate their workflows can find opportunities to eliminate unnecessary steps and automate repetitive work. Consistent, efficient operations can also contribute to a more consistent patient experience, which can influence how patients perceive a healthcare practice.
4 Inefficiencies That Can Slow Down Your Practice
1. Manual work that could be automated
When a team performs the same manual task dozens or hundreds of times, even a small amount of automation can make a meaningful difference. Appointment reminders, patient notifications, payment communications, data entry, and other repetitive processes may be candidates for automation.
2. Switching between disconnected technology
A practice may use separate platforms for scheduling, electronic health records, billing, prescribing, and patient communication. If those systems are disconnected, staff may need to enter the same information multiple times or manually transfer information between platforms. Connected technology can reduce handoffs and create more consistent workflows.
3. Searching for information
How much time does your team spend looking for information? It could be a patient message, a billing status, a document, a prescription request, or the current status of a task. Finding that information may only take a few minutes, but repeated searches can become a significant source of lost time.
4. Following up on outstanding tasks
Follow-up can be one of the easiest time-wasters to overlook. Staff may need to check whether a claim has been paid, whether a patient has responded, whether missing information has been received, or whether another team member has completed a task.
Without clear ownership, status tracking, or automated notifications, employees may repeatedly check the same items or spend time figuring out what needs to happen next.
How to Find Your Practice’s Biggest Time-Waster
Track where staff spend their time
For several days, ask staff to record the tasks they perform and roughly how much time they spend on them. Multiple employees spending time on the same repetitive task or a seemingly simple process consistently taking longer than expected may point to an opportunity for improvement.
Ask your staff:
- Could part of the process be automated?
- Could the task be standardized?
- Is the same information being entered more than once?
- Could multiple steps be consolidated?
Look at data
Data can also help practices understand where improvements are needed and measure whether changes are working. Clinical analytics, for example, can provide insights that help practices make more informed decisions about patient care and operations.
Ask staff where work breaks down
The people performing a workflow every day are often the best source of information about where it is inefficient. Ask them which processes frustrate them most. What information is hardest for them to find? Which tasks require the most follow-up? These conversations can uncover inefficiencies that may not be obvious to practice leadership.
Identify bottlenecks
A bottleneck is a point in a workflow that slows down everything that follows it. For example, missing patient information could delay billing, or a manual authorization process could delay scheduling.
Strategies for Improving Practice Efficiency
Automate where possible
Identify repetitive administrative tasks that can be automated without sacrificing quality or patient experience.
Consolidate workflows
Look for opportunities to reduce the number of systems, handoffs, and duplicate data-entry points employees encounter during routine work. The more you consolidate and connect your workflows, the more efficient your work will be.
Standardize processes
Document processes for recurring tasks so employees do not have to determine what to do from scratch each time. Consistent workflows can also help practices build efficiency and deliver a more reliable patient experience.
Build Resilience Through Better Workflows
Operational resilience is an ongoing process. As patient volume, staffing, technology, and administrative requirements change, practices should continue evaluating whether their workflows are keeping pace.
When practices understand where time is going, they can make more informed decisions about which processes to automate, consolidate, standardize, or eliminate. Those improvements can help create workflows that are more efficient today and more resilient as the practice changes.
FAQs
What are the biggest time-wasters in a medical practice?
Common time-wasters include repetitive manual work, disconnected technology systems, searching for information, routine communication that could be automated, and repeated follow-up on outstanding tasks.
How can a medical practice identify workflow inefficiencies?
Practices can track how staff spend their time, identify repetitive tasks, ask employees where workflows break down, and look for bottlenecks that consistently slow down work.
How can technology improve operational efficiency in a medical practice?
Technology can help automate repetitive tasks, connect workflows, centralize information, reduce duplicate data entry, and give staff easier access to the information they need.
