Administrative work has quietly become one of the biggest barriers to sustainable healthcare operations. Today, 86% of providers identify administrative burden as a major challenge to financial resilience, yet much of that burden is accepted as unavoidable. Over time, manual workflows turn into habit, and their true cost becomes difficult to see.
For many independent practices, the problem isn’t a lack of effort or commitment. It’s that manual processes—insurance checks, data entry, documentation follow-ups—have become the default way work gets done. Those processes rarely show up as a single line item on a financial report, but they steadily increase labor costs, slow revenue, and drain staff capacity.
At Talisman Solutions Inc., we see a clear difference between practices that are struggling and those that are scaling efficiently. The most successful organizations are no longer hiring people simply to perform tasks. They are building systems and hiring staff to oversee them. That shift matters, especially when 62% of providers report that staff wages are the area most affected by inflation.
The Over-Staffing Trap
As administrative volume grows, many practices respond by adding headcount. On the surface, this feels like the fastest way to keep up. In reality, it often creates a long-term cost problem.
The insight for modern administrators is that many practices are effectively over-staffed—not because they have too many people, but because too many hours are spent on work that could be streamlined through healthcare administrative automation.
The difference in administrative effort between manual and automated practices is significant:
- The average practice spends up to 10 hours per week on administrative duties
- The bottom 40% of practices spend 10 to 28 hours per week on the same work
- Top-performing practices, using automated processes, spend just 2 hours per week on administrative labor
Those extra hours don’t just affect efficiency. They directly increase payroll costs, reduce staff satisfaction, and limit a practice’s ability to grow without adding more people.
Where the Time Really Goes: Manual vs. Automated RCM
To understand how practices lose as much as 26 hours of productivity each week, it helps to break down where that time is actually spent.
Insurance Verification and Pre-Authorization
Currently, 67% of practices spend up to 10 hours per week manually verifying insurance and managing pre-authorizations. With automation in place, that workload is typically reduced to about 3 hours per week, without sacrificing accuracy.
Patient Intake
Manual patient intake takes 11 to 20 minutes per patient. Digital intake tools reduce that time to around 5 minutes per patient, while also improving data completeness and reducing downstream billing issues.
Medical Charting
Documentation remains one of the biggest drains on provider time. Forty-one percent of providers spend more than a quarter of their workday on documentation. When AI-supported documentation and AI medical billing services are introduced, 34% of providers save more than an hour every day.
Individually, these time losses may not feel dramatic. Combined, they represent weeks of lost productivity every month.
A Simple Way to Benchmark Your Practice
One of the most effective steps a practice can take is to measure current workflows against best-in-class benchmarks. The goal isn’t perfection—it’s visibility.
Use the framework below to assess where manual work is consuming time:
| Task | Your Current Weekly Time | Best-in-Class Benchmark |
| Manual Billing / Verification | _____ Hours | 3 Hours |
| Scheduling (Manual Touches) | _____ Touches | 1 Touch per Appointment |
| Patient Intake (Per Patient) | _____ Minutes | 5 Minutes |
| After-Hours Documentation | _____ Minutes | 0 Minutes (with AI assist) |
If your manual billing and payment-related tasks exceed 10 hours per week, your practice is likely losing the equivalent of seven full working days every month to redundant administrative labor.
The Talisman Solutions Approach
At Talisman Solutions, our role is to help practices move away from task-heavy operations and toward system-led workflows. We help practices put healthcare administrative automation in place so staff can focus on overseeing systems instead of manually moving data.
By integrating AI medical billing services with robotic process automation (RPA), our clients typically see:
- 87% reduction in manual data entry
- 60% improvement in overall revenue cycle management performance
Our solutions are designed to reduce friction across the entire workflow—from AI Note Assist, which helps reduce provider burnout by 63%, to automated claim scrubbing that prevents errors before claims are submitted. The result is fewer manual corrections, fewer delays, and stronger financial control.
We use AI and automation to improve outcomes and make our clients’ revenue cycles smoother, so they can grow and focus on what matters most—providing quality care to their patients.
The AI we use is never left to operate on its own. At each step, experienced professionals stay involved—reviewing suggestions, checking flags, and making final decisions based on years of real, hands-on work. Their judgment comes from working directly with providers and healthcare organizations in day-to-day RCM environments, not from theory.
This human-in-the-loop approach helps us use AI in a practical, responsible way. It cuts down on errors, saves time, keeps costs in check, and leads to more consistent and dependable revenue results.
Reclaiming Your Practice’s Potential
Every hour spent manually moving data between disconnected systems is an hour taken away from patient care, planning, or developing staff. Manual work doesn’t just slow things down—it allows inefficiencies to go unnoticed and gradually reduce margins.
Practices that benchmark themselves against top performers and adopt a system-oversight model consistently reduce administrative workload from as much as 28 hours per week to just 2. That shift creates space for growth without adding headcount.
Automation isn’t about doing less work. It’s about using systems to handle repetitive work so teams can spend their time where it has the most impact.
AI and automation don’t work well in isolation. When paired with experienced human oversight, AI supports the work while people apply judgment and final review, leading to more reliable outcomes.
