Not the consulting room. The admin around it: the referral sitting unactioned, the insurer shortfall nobody chased, the clinic letter still unsent a fortnight later. We tell you which of it is worth handing over, and in what order.
Most clinic owners know AI could take some of this off them. What they are missing is someone who will look at their own week and say which part to hand over first, and which part must never move.
Referrals come in every format anyone has ever used, and a secretary reads each one to work out the specialty, the urgency, the insurer and whether you can even see them. Before anything gets booked.
Every conference has a diagnostic tool now. What is actually costing you is the secretary's afternoon on Healthcode shortfalls and nobody is selling anything for that.
Remittances that do not match the invoice, shortfalls under a code you have to look up, and a reconciliation job that only happens when somebody has a quiet week. Which they do not.
None of that is a technology problem. It is a question of which job goes first, and which never goes at all. That is the bit we do.
Every one of these is administrative. None of them makes a clinical decision, and the plan draws that line explicitly on every recommendation rather than leaving you to assume it.
Referrals arrive by email, post and fax, and a secretary reads every one to work out specialty, urgency and funding.
Reads the referral whatever the format, extracts the history and the question being asked, identifies the insurer and the funding route, and puts a complete record in front of the right list.
Clinical urgency. A clinician decides how quickly someone is seen, and anything flagged as possibly urgent goes to them immediately.
Membership numbers, authorisation codes and benefit checks chased by phone, and appointments booked hoping it will come through.
Requests the authorisation, tracks what is outstanding against each booking, and flags the appointment that is going ahead without cover before the patient arrives.
Whether to proceed without authorisation. That is a commercial call.
Invoices raised, remittances arriving weeks later in a different format, and shortfalls found only if someone reconciles by hand.
Matches every remittance to its invoice, identifies the shortfalls and the reason codes, and assembles the query with the evidence attached ready to submit.
Whether to challenge a shortfall or write it off.
Dictation queued, typed by a secretary days later, checked when the consultant next has ten minutes, and sent a fortnight after the appointment.
Produces the draft from the dictation in your own letter structure, with the demographics, referrer and coding already populated, ready for the clinician.
Every clinical word. The consultant reads and approves every letter before it leaves. Nothing is sent unread, ever.
A cancellation on Thursday leaves a Friday slot empty because nobody had time to work down the list.
Offers the freed slot to the waiting list in your own priority order, confirms the first acceptance, and updates the diary.
Clinical priority on the waiting list. Who should be seen sooner is not an administrative decision.
Enquiries out of hours go to voicemail, and by Monday the patient has booked with someone else.
Answers the enquiry, explains what the clinic covers and the funding routes, collects the details you always need, and books against real availability.
Anything symptom related. If a message describes symptoms it goes to a person, and the automation never responds to it.
Consent forms and questionnaires printed in the waiting room, then typed back into the record afterwards.
Sends the right forms before the appointment, chases what has not come back, and files the completed ones against the record.
Taking consent. That is a conversation with a clinician.
Someone remembers to check whether the imaging came back, or someone does not.
Tracks every test ordered against what has returned, and escalates the ones that have not arrived within your own timescale.
Reading and acting on every result. The automation chases the envelope, it never opens the clinical question.
Annual reviews and follow-ups tracked in a spreadsheet somebody has to remember to open.
Tracks who is due against the interval the clinician set, invites them, and follows up when there is no response.
Setting the interval. That is a clinical decision, made in clinic.
The phone goes unanswered during clinic, and the callback list grows all afternoon.
Answers, takes the reason for the call, deals with the straightforward ones, and puts everything else on the callback list in priority order.
Anything urgent or clinical, routed to a person immediately.
Audit, training and incident evidence assembled in the fortnight after an inspection is announced.
Collects the evidence against each key question as it is created, so the folder is current rather than reconstructed under pressure.
What you say about your own service. The registered manager writes that and nothing drafts it for them.
Nobody starts with eleven. A plan usually puts two live in the first month and leaves the rest ranked and waiting, so when you have the appetite for the next one you already know which it is.
Most of the job is joining up the systems you pay for rather than moving you off them. These are the ones we come across most in private practice, and we have no affiliation with any of them.
Three steps. You do the talking on the first one, and nothing is committed until you have seen what we found.
No prep, no agenda to fill in. We ask the questions and you walk us through how your week actually runs: the jobs, the tools, the emails you send a dozen times a month.
Recorded and written up, so you never repeat yourself.
We work back through the call and map where your time actually goes. Then we find the automations that suit your tools, your team and your budget, ordered so the biggest time saving comes first.
Back with you within a week.
We walk you through the whole report, recommendation by recommendation, and you decide what to take on first. Most people have their first automation running within a week of that call.
The report is yours to keep either way.
The plan tells you what to build. The dashboard shows you what it is doing once it is built, so you can see what you are getting back without asking us.
Set up when the plan is delivered, at app.fewerhours.com under your business name. No shared login and nothing to install.
Every one we build reports the hours it saved and the work it handled, so the value is a number you can check rather than a promise we made.
The rest of the ranked list sits there waiting. When you have the appetite for the next one, you already know which it is.
This works best where the owner can still see the whole clinic. There are a few cases where it would waste your time, and those are worth saying out loud.
Fewer Hours exists because too many owners knew AI could help them somewhere and had no way of telling a good idea from a sales pitch. The plan is the boring part done properly: sitting with the real workflow and working out which jobs are worth handing over.
Whoever takes your call is the person who writes your plan. No account manager, no junior doing the analysis, and nobody trying to move you onto a retainer at the end of it.
Three steps, and you can stop after any of them. The first one is a conversation, and nothing about it commits you to the next.
A short chat about how your business runs. If there’s nothing here worth mapping, we’ll say so on the call.
The full job. We map the workflows, score every candidate, and hand over the ranked list and the 30-day plan.
If you’d rather we built the projects than just planned them, we’ll do the ones the audit put first. Anything from a quick win to a full agent build.
If there are fewer than five of you and admin takes about an hour a day, there probably isn’t enough here to be worth mapping, and we’ll say so. If you already know exactly which job you want automated, skip the audit and just ask us to build it. And if your processes only exist in your head, we’ll tell you to go and write them down first.
If yours is not here, ask on the call. It is twenty minutes about how the clinic runs, not a pitch.
No, and that is not a soft no. Nothing we recommend triages by clinical urgency, interprets a result, gives advice, or sends anything clinical without a clinician approving it. Every automation on the list is administrative and the plan names what stays with a clinician on each one.
Every recommendation states what data it touches and where that data ends up. With patient data the default is stricter than elsewhere: it stays inside systems you already control, and anything that would move it is flagged with the alternative before it reaches the plan. Some jobs get ruled out on this basis and the plan says which.
It can produce the draft with the structure, demographics and referrer already in place, which is where most of the turnaround time goes. The clinician reads and approves every letter before it is sent. A letter that goes out unread is not a time saving, it is a liability.
That is one of the first things we check. Some of it is the API, some is a feature your system already ships and nobody switched on, and some is email and a shared folder joined up properly. Healthcode reconciliation in particular is usually the highest value item on the list, because the shortfalls are real money and nobody has time to chase them.
The registered manager remains accountable exactly as now. What the plan does is make the evidence easier to produce and keep current. Where an automation touches anything a regulator would look at, it produces a draft for a person to approve rather than acting alone.
It goes to a person, immediately, and the automation does not reply. Anything describing symptoms is routed rather than answered, and we design that rule before anything else on a clinic plan, because it is the one that matters.
Usually yes, because single-handed practices carry the same administrative load as larger ones with nobody to absorb it. Referral intake and insurer reconciliation are worth it at almost any size.
The plan lands about two weeks after the call. Most clinics have the first automation live within a week of that, because the first one is usually referral intake or billing reconciliation and neither needs anyone to change system.
The call takes twenty minutes and it is about how the clinic runs, not about software. The plan lands about two weeks later.