4 stats about how AI in healthcare saves time at small practices

Less admin. More patient care. Real results from real practices like yours.

If you’re like most independent physicians or small practice leaders, your day is a careful balance of delivering exceptional care, running a business, and somehow making time for yourself. Every extra click, form, or follow-up eats into that balance, contributing to burnout and pulling you further from your patients.

That’s why more small practices are turning to AI-powered tools to automate the administrative work that bogs them down. At athenahealth, we’re focused on applying AI in healthcare where it can have the most immediate and meaningful impact—saving you time, reducing costly errors, and simplifying day-to-day practice operations.

Here are four measurable ways some of the AI technologies in athenaOne® are making a difference for clinicians and practice managers across the nation:

1. 80% fewer clicks to submit an order—just speak and go

When you’re seeing patients back-to-back, every extra tap and screen slows you down. Using the AI-enabled voice navigation in athenaOne Voice Assistant powered by Nuance®, clinicians can complete tasks simply by speaking. Just say, “Hey athena, prescribe 20 micrograms of Zocor QD, 90-day supply,” and the system creates the order for you—no need to search or type.

This voice navigation capability streamlines everything from placing orders to reviewing chart data, cutting down clicks by 80% on average.¹

The impact: Less screen time. More face time. And a smoother, more intuitive way to work, especially when you’re on the go.

2. 91% less time spent sorting and routing faxed documents

Incoming documents—like faxes, referrals, and lab results—are essential to patient care, but they can quickly pile up and slow your team down. That’s where AI applications in healthcare like machine learning and computer vision step in. Our Document Services AI processes millions of external faxes each month, accurately identifying document types and pulling out key details like patient name, provider, sender, and date of service. From there, it automatically tags and routes each document to the right place in your EHR, so your team doesn’t have to.

Practices using this workflow have seen a 91% reduction in document processing time.²

The impact: Your staff no longer must spend hours clicking through digital paper trails or manually typing in information from received faxes. With help from artificial intelligence, they can focus on higher-value work like patient coordination and follow-up.

By automating repetitive tasks, streamlining documentation, and freeing up staff to focus on patients, these innovations are helping reduce physician burnout, so you can look forward to coming to work each day.

3. 45% faster clinical analysis for prior authorizations

Submitting a prior authorization request often means digging through clinical notes and manually completing forms—slowing down care and tying up valuable time. athenaOne’s AI-enhanced prior authorization workflow uses machine learning to automatically pull relevant information from the patient’s chart and complete clinical forms as part of the submission process. This automation reduces the time it takes to gather and submit documentation, cutting clinical review time by 45%.³

The impact: Faster turnaround on precertification tasks, quicker decisions on care, and more time for your team to focus on patients, not paperwork.

4. 7.4% fewer denials from insurance selection errors

Submitting a claim with incorrect insurance details is one of the most common—and costly—revenue cycle pitfalls. It can lead to claim denials, delayed payments, and unnecessary administrative back-and-forth. Enter Automated Insurance Selection to expedite this process and reduce manual input and potential errors.

Using machine learning artificial intelligence, the Automated Insurance Selection tool reviews patient visit data and historical information to help your team select the most accurate insurance, ensuring that claims go to the right payer with the right details the first time.

This smart, data-driven approach has helped reduce insurance-related claim denials by 7.4% for practices using the workflow.⁴

The impact: Fewer payment delays. Less rework. And smoother revenue cycle operations for your small but mighty team.

What these AI-enabled features mean for your practice

As a physician running your own small practice, you're not just delivering care. You’re also managing staff, keeping the business running, and trying to carve out a little space for yourself. At athenahealth, we’re focused on applying natural language processing, machine learning, computer vision, and generative AI in ways that support small practices like yours.

By automating repetitive tasks, streamlining documentation, and freeing up staff to focus on patients, these innovations are helping reduce physician burnout and help you look forward to coming to work each day.

Artificial intelligence capabilities embedded within athenaOne work quietly in the background, helping solve real problems like documentation overload, insurance verification, and process inefficiencies. When you leverage the benefits of AI in healthcare, you get more time, better accuracy, and the flexibility to run your practice the way you want, thanks to technology that works as hard as you do.

Want to explore how these AI tools can help your team?

Whether you’re considering switching to athenaOne or already a customer looking to get more out of your technology, these AI-powered healthcare tools are designed to support you—not as a buzzword, but as a practical solution to some of your biggest day-to-day challenges.

Get in touch to see how intelligent, purpose-built AI in athenaOne can help your practice save time, reduce administrative work, and stay focused on delivering great care.