Administrative overload is painful and prevents healthy growth

Medical operations are under pressure. Administrative work represents more than 40% of total operating costs, skilled and compliant local labor is scarce and expensive, and traditional hiring models often can’t scale to meet regulatory requirements and performance expectations.

Yet, too often, practices underestimate the toll administrative shortages take on workforce stability and patient care — a challenge underscored in Edge’s 2025 Medical Industry Report. Many hospitals and clinics try to ignore it and hope it will go away. As a doctor who has worked for operations large and small, I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

Ultimately, such denial creates interpersonal problems among staff, drives employees and patients away, and costs hospitals and practices a boatload of money that prevents growth.

Here’s my diagnosis, and a prescription to alleviate the pain for workers, patients and practices.

Traditional staffing models no longer work

Seventy percent of medical groups reported their ratio of support staff to full-time physicians increased or stayed the same in 2023, according to the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA). The same MGMA research revealed that more than four in 10 leaders of those same practices said that their current support staffing levels still were inadequate to meet patient demand.

Part of the staffing challenge is that front- and back-office workers often view these jobs as stepping stones. Some practices have an average tenure of just 10 months. The fact that pay rates for these administrative roles tend to be at or around minimum wage, especially at universities and state governments, only adds to the problem. Hospitals and clinics often spend significant time and money training people only to see them leave after a few months for better insurance, shorter commutes, a few more dollars an hour or greater stability.

This leaves remaining staff scrambling to try to keep up with critical tasks such as prior authorization, insurance verification and billing. This hurts clinics and hospitals over time.

Office workers and doctors are feeling the pain

When front- and back-office staff can’t handle their workloads, doctors often get involved.

If the doctor needs to do tasks like reminding patients about medication refills or calling their families to pick them up, that takes them away from actually treating patients. This places an added burden on doctors, whose work hours quickly multiply and result in doctor burnout.

As a result, doctors may move to clinics and hospitals that are properly staffed.

Inadequate staffing creates operational risk

Medical practices are patients’ lifelines. If you don’t provide these people adequate care, your patients won’t have good experiences, may leave you bad reviews or decide to go elsewhere.

Front-office staff play an important role in preparing patients for doctor interactions. Patients’ view of that overall treatment is an important component of medicine and wellness. But if the front desk employee at a clinic is handling billing and charged with three or four other tasks, they may not have the time or inclination to give patients the first-touch attention they deserve. That can set the tone for how patients interact with and view their treatment from the doctor.

Overloaded staff can lead to financial problems as well.

From my experience, doctors across disciplines typically make about 50% to 60% of what they bill. The rest goes to overhead. If you fall behind in billing even a few days, it creates real problems.

According to the American Hospital Association, half of hospitals and health systems had more than $100 million in accounts receivable for claims older than six months in 2022. In my own work, I have learned of at least one hospital with more than $1 billion in unpaid claims.

Shortages can also limit patient access

Hospital systems, dentist offices and small doctors’ practices that are stretched thin can easily get inundated with more administrative work than they can handle. During the cold and flu season, which is happening now, it gets even worse. That can impede patient access to needed care.

The 2024 AMGA Clinical Staffing Survey indicates that within system-affiliated groups, wait times for established patients have risen from 1.1 days in 2022 to 4.4 days in 2024, and schedule fill rates have increased almost 5% for system-affiliated groups over the same period.

A colleague with a family of six recently mentioned he was trying to make dental appointments. He had to call eight different practices before finding an office that could take all six.

Not only did he struggle to get care, but the other dentist offices missed out on his business. If the service for each family member was $2,000, that’s potentially $12,000 in lost revenue.

Hospitals and medical practices can’t afford business as usual

Spending a few extra hundred dollars a month on a flexible workforce platform that combines people, process and technology can position you to maximize revenue and save on costs.

For example, in California, an in-house employee for a midsize group would probably cost $70,000 to $90,000 a year when you figure in benefits and other costs. Even if you could get people for $20 an hour plus costs, you are still looking at costs well north of $40,000 a year. But by using remote talent, you can get highly qualified, college-educated staff for around $25,000 to $30,000 a year, which is significantly less than you would be able to achieve otherwise.

Several private equity-backed offices used a flexible workforce platform to scale their operations and saved about $300,000 a year. This positioned them to sell the practice for about $2.5 million more — an 8x multiple — than they would have been able to do with business as usual.

Why? Because the clinics could schedule patients appropriately, do prior authorizations and bill in a timely manner. That enabled the clinics to keep doctors and staff happy, avoid incurring the added costs and hassle of high turnover, do more and ultimately scale the business.

Balancing human expertise and technology to advance access, experiences and growth

If your operation is already overloaded, or headed in that direction, it may be hard to get your head around changing the way you do things. But resist the urge to ignore employee overload.

Here’s how to get started and what to consider as you fix overload and drive future growth:

1. Understand you don’t have to go it alone. The right partner will work to understand your practice, identify your biggest pain points, and implement the right balance of people, process and technology to meet your goals — whether that’s decreasing readmission rates by 20%, increasing reimbursements by 30% or achieving other metrics.
2. Find a supplier that makes you comfortable. Engage with a company that has done this before. Identify a partner that will serve as a consultant to help you scale your practice.
3. Ensure proper training. Avoid simply throwing people at the problem. Seek a partner that provides training up front and on an ongoing basis as well as helpful technology.
4. Employ artificial intelligence (AI) in a supporting role. AI can add a lot of value in assisting with repetitive tasks such as medication refills and responding to certain insurance matters. But it’s important that your practice revolves around your staff and the patients, not around AI.
5. Demand security. Look for a workforce partner that is compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, is SOC 2 certified and continues conducting training to ensure you maintain the highest level of security.
6. Look for signs of commitment. Many suppliers require remote staff to sign business associate agreements (BAAs), putting responsibility on those individuals if anything goes wrong. Steer clear of these companies. Choose a partner that signs BAAs itself, signaling it is invested in doing the job right.
7. Address administrative overload before it takes over your life. Once a workflow is broken, it’s much harder to fix. Get in front of the problem, and get started today.

Rihan Javid, D.O., J.D., is a psychiatrist and co-founder of Edge, the flexible workforce platform for high-compliance industries. Edge unites people, process and AI technology to empower medical, dental, insurance and other businesses to scale operations in a compliant, cost-effective and fail-safe way — benefiting doctors, front- and back-office staff, and patients.