Automation in Daily Practice: Prescriptions, Test Results, Callbacks
Where automation immediately saves time in a medical practice, where it clearly must stop, and how much a practice realistically gains.
Dr. techn. Alireza Fasih ·
If you ask what makes the day long in an Ordination (medical practice), you rarely hear about medicine. You hear about the paper. About the stack of notes next to the phone that says, "Mrs. M., blood pressure pills, will call back." About the prescription binder. About the list of callbacks that is supposed to be cleared by four o'clock and is still not empty at five.
This work is not difficult. It is fragmented. And that is exactly what makes it so expensive, because every interruption costs more than the task itself.
Prescription requests: the quiet constant
In an average general medicine practice, prescription requests account for between fifteen and thirty percent of all calls. For patients with chronic conditions, it is the only regular contact with the Ordination.
The problem is rarely the request itself, but its incompleteness. A patient says, "the blood pressure pills." Which dosage, which package size, since when, how often. The assistant has to look it up in the patient file, which takes time, and in the meantime, the next phone rings.
Automated, this looks different. Whether via a form on your website or via the phone assistant: it asks for what is needed. Name, social security number, medication, dosage, package size, dosing schedule. Incomplete requests are not accepted in the first place; instead, clarification is requested. What reaches you is a list that the doctor can process sequentially.
The gain does not lie in a prescription being generated faster. It lies in the fact that no follow-up questions are necessary.
Test results and documents
The second most common reason for a callback is the question of whether a test result has arrived yet. This is purely a status question.
A simple reversal helps here. Instead of waiting for the patient to call, inform them as soon as the result is there. A short message stating that documents are available and how they can be picked up or discussed. This replaces three calls per test result.
Conversely, the same applies to documents coming from outside. An upload form, through which patients can send test results from a Facharzt (specialist) or from the hospital in advance, saves you scanning at the front desk and saves the patient the trip. The only important thing is that it is clearly regulated how long these files are kept and who deletes them.
The callback list that is no longer needed
Callbacks almost always arise for a single reason: someone was unreachable during the first contact or a piece of information was missing.
If an assistant takes every call and records the requests completely, the callback list shrinks to those cases where a medical decision is actually necessary. These are usually few per day. And these few are then prepared, with the request, medical history, and availability.
A team that has four callbacks instead of eighteen works noticeably differently. This is the point where automation stops being an efficiency issue and becomes an issue of job satisfaction.
Summaries instead of transcripts
Every conversation an assistant handles can land in your inbox as a short summary. Not as a raw transcript that no one reads, but as three sentences: who called, what was it about, what needs to be done.
In practice, this is one of the most underestimated features. In the evening, the doctor sees in two minutes what organizational requests came in during the day, without anyone having to report them. If you wish, only certain requests trigger an email, such as prescription requests or cancellations for the next day.
What should not be automated
There are areas where automation does harm, and they should be clearly named.
Everything that requires an assessment of the condition remains with humans. An assistant may record and forward symptoms, but it may not evaluate them. It may state that emergency services must be contacted immediately for certain complaints, but it may not decide whether a complaint is harmless.
Nor should bad news be automated. An abnormal test result is not communicated via an automated message. This is not a technical boundary, but a professional ethical one, and it is non-negotiable.
And finally: whoever knows you and wants to speak with you must be able to reach you. An assistant that refuses or complicates a transfer to a human is configured incorrectly. The option to speak with the team must be accessible at any time in a single sentence.
How much this really yields
Let us calculate conservatively. An Ordination with one hundred calls per day, sixty-five percent of which are routine. Two minutes per routine call is roughly two hours of pure talk time. Added to this is the cost of interruption, which the literature estimates at one to two times the actual task.
So you are talking about two to four hours per day tied up at the front desk without anything medical happening. Even if you only reclaim half of that, it is half a position that you do not have to search for, train, and replace.
The path there is shorter than you think
Automation in daily practice rarely fails because of the technology. It fails because no one has the time to implement it.
That is why the only scope that works is a small one. One area, clearly defined, productive in a few days, measurable afterward. Take prescription requests. Or calls outside of opening hours. If this one area works after two weeks, you decide on the next. If not, you have lost little.
We work exactly like this. Short steps, real workflows, no project plans spanning months. If you want to know which area in your Ordination will show an impact the fastest, let us look at it together: servus-ki.com.