JJ Signal · Research · 8 min read
Where a clinic's hours actually go
We timed reception work across four clinics. The consulting room was not the constraint, and neither was the software.
Published Healthcare & Clinics
Clinic productivity work aims at the consultation because that is where the clinical value is. In the practices we have measured, the recoverable hours were almost entirely at the desk and in the handoffs between systems — which is fortunate, because those are the hours you can automate without going anywhere near a clinical decision.
The evidence
Drawn from our own delivery work. Each claim states its sample and its method, including where the sample is small.
- 01Reception spent the majority of the morning shift re-keying information the patient had already written down.Observed across four clinics in one group over a full morning each, plus two reception desks shadowed for a week. One group, so this is a detailed account of one organisation rather than a sector finding.
- 02Errors concentrated in three fields: allergies, current medication and insurance number.These are the fields that are hardest to read from handwriting and most consequential to get wrong. The correction loop ran through the clinician, so a desk error cost clinical time too.
- 03In an adjacent diagnostics engagement, analysis was 40 minutes of a 72-hour report cycle.One laboratory, every handoff timed from instrument export to referring clinic inbox. The remaining 71 hours were waiting, not work.
What follows from it
Before buying anything, time your handoffs. The stage everyone names as the bottleneck is frequently not it, and the difference between automating the right handoff and the wrong one is the entire return.
What we would do
- 01Shadow two reception desks through a full morning before proposing anything. The workarounds are the requirements.
- 02Move intake to the channel the patient already books from, and validate the three high-risk fields before arrival rather than at it.
- 03Keep the clipboard for walk-ins. Removing the exception path makes the exception the hardest case.
- 04Keep every generated clinical line a draft until a clinician accepts it — as a constraint in the system, not a policy in a document.
Get JJ Signal by email
Roughly monthly, and only when there is something measured to report. If a month produces nothing worth your attention, you get nothing.
What you are signing up to