A five-minute callback doesn’t sound like much. Make that callback 20 times a week, and that’s more than an hour and a half spent on phone tag. Add voicemails, insurance checks, scheduling corrections, and patients who can’t find an appointment online so they call instead.
None of these show up on a to-do list, nor are any of them big enough to flag on their own. But an MGMA Stat 2026 study shows that medical practice staff spent 31% of their time on the phones doing scheduling tasks. That means these small, invisible tasks claim a third of the workday. For growing practices, that time especially matters.
The real cost of manual processes
At first glance, you might think you have a staffing problem. But even the most well-staffed, well-organized teams can fall victim to these “invisible tasks.” They’re the repetitive steps that make routine work drag longer than it should.
This can hit growing practices hardest, especially those without the infrastructure of a much larger organization, like a dedicated corporate call center. Those operations get absorbed by practice managers and front desk staff alongside everything else that keeps the practice moving.
Rebecca Pihera, APRN, founder and owner of Psych Care ATL, understands the pattern well. She says her team spends roughly 37 hours a week on nurse administrative and billing tasks.
Where these invisible tasks hide
Before the appointment exists
Turning a patient’s request into a booked visit often involves more steps than it looks like from the outside.
“There is a good amount of back-and-forth when the visit is initially scheduled, to make sure the patient is matched with the right provider at a time that works for them,” Pihera says about her team. “We also have to ensure paperwork is completed and we have their current insurance information. Getting updated insurance from established patients can also be time-consuming and sometimes doesn’t happen until after the visit has occurred, which adds additional complexity and delays in getting claims processed.”
That kind of matching isn’t unique to behavioral health. Many practices weigh a patient’s reason for the visit, provider specialty, appointment type, location, and availability before finding the right slot. From there, insurance verification can take anywhere from 15 minutes to multiple hours per patient, depending on phone wait times and portal delays. And there’s little time to spare: nearly 1 in 3 Zocdoc appointments happen within 48 hours of booking. That’s a tight runway to sort everything out before the patient is ready to be seen.
After the appointment is scheduled
The front desk’s job isn’t done after the patient is on the books. Administrative headaches can continue after an appointment is booked. Say a patient picks the wrong appointment type. Someone has to spot the error, call them, find a new time, update the schedule, and fill the new gap. If a provider’s schedule shifts, the team has to scramble to block off slots, notify affected patients, and work with them to rebook.
Cancellations create a similar problem, but they also create a race against the clock. The sooner a practice can find someone to take an open slot, the better its chances of keeping that appointment productive. At Psych Care ATL, Pihera’s team maintains a waitlist of patients who want to be seen sooner than their scheduled appointment, which gives them a ready pool of people to contact when a cancellation opens up. But that still requires staff to reach out to the patient.
In between your systems
Information often has to move by hand from a contact form into a scheduling system, then into the EHR.
Consider this example: A patient starts on your website. The inquiry lands in an inbox. Someone moves the information into another system. The patient gets a call, which becomes a voicemail. They call back, someone checks the schedule, and the appointment is entered once into the scheduling system, and again into the EHR, so it shows up where the provider will actually see it.
Nothing went “wrong” in that scenario. It’s just how long a simple request takes to travel from a website form to a real appointment when a person has to carry it through every step by hand.
Why this stays invisible
If these tasks cost so much time, why don’t they show up as a problem anyone tracks? Mostly because staff get good at workarounds. A front desk that’s been running for years develops shortcuts and legacy knowledge for handling the exceptions.
Pihera’s team has built clear priorities, checks, and balances into their daily workflow to identify what needs immediate attention and what can wait. They can also correct virtual visits mistakenly flagged as in-person on the backend and send patients the proper telehealth link.
Those workarounds can keep the practice moving, but they still add to the workload. One practice that scaled from a single clinician to more than a dozen changed how bookings landed on the schedule entirely, letting bookings flow directly onto clinicians’ schedules without additional administrative work.
A quick self-check
Operational efficiency starts with noticing how much of your team’s day is already being claimed by steps nobody chose to add. This week, try asking your team:
- How often today did you have to retype patient info between two systems that should just connect?
- Of all the voicemails you returned, how many were basic appointment requests and confirmations?
- How many of those callbacks turned into a back-and-forth game of phone tag just to answer one “quick question”?
- How much time did you spend manually reaching out to patients to fill open slots on next week’s schedule?
- Did you have to put a patient standing right in front of you on hold to handle a routine scheduling call?
That last question might sting. Take what you learned from your conversations and go back to the math from the start: a five-minute task, repeated 20 times a week, is more than an hour and a half. Multiply that across insurance checks, callbacks, corrections, and handoffs, and the hours add up fast. Reclaiming even a few of them means more capacity for the part of the job that actually needs a person.
Keep people in the parts that need people
Some tasks require human nuance. A patient with a complicated question may need a conversation, some provider matches require judgement, and scheduling problems occasionally need someone to troubleshoot.
But not every patient looking for an available appointment needs a team member to spend 10 minutes finding it for them. A patient who already knows which provider they want to see may not need the same guidance as someone who needs support finding the right provider or confirming insurance coverage. And staff shouldn’t have to manually move information between systems just to get on the books.
Zocdoc can reduce the steps that staff have to manage between a patient looking for care and getting an appointment scheduled, including finding near-term availability, connecting patients with appropriate providers, and verifying insurance plans. By handling more of those steps online, Zocdoc can give front-desk teams time back while guiding patients through the booking process
The human side of care is irreplaceable. Integrating scheduling tools to handle routine tasks frees up your front desk for what matters most: helping the patient on the phone or right in front of them.
Want more practical ways to make scheduling easier on your team? Learn how to schedule patients effectively without burning out your front desk.