A 7-person audiology practice: one managing director, one senior audiologist, two clinical audiologists, three administrative coordinators.
The coordinators do everything that happens before and after a patient sits in the chair. Scheduling, intake paperwork, appointment confirmations, answering the same questions about insurance and parking and what to bring. It's not glamorous work, but it matters. When it doesn't get done well, patients show up unprepared, appointments run long, and the audiologists spend the first ten minutes of a 45-minute slot on things that should have been handled days earlier.
The problem isn't that the coordinators are bad at their jobs. The problem is that a big chunk of what they do is repeatable, and repeatable work is exactly where AI earns its place.
Here's what the intake flow looked like before: a patient books an appointment, a coordinator calls or emails to confirm, sends a PDF form, waits for it to come back (sometimes it doesn't), follows up, and finally pulls together whatever information arrived before the appointment. On a busy day, three coordinators are each doing some version of this for 15 to 20 patients.
With an AI intake system, the process starts the moment someone books. The patient gets an automated message with a digital intake form built to ask the right questions for an audiology visit. Hearing history, current concerns, insurance information, medications. The form is conversational, not a PDF. If a patient doesn't complete it, the system follows up automatically.
By the time the appointment day arrives, the audiologist has a complete intake summary in front of them before the patient walks in.
New patient inquiries that come in during off-hours get a same-day response instead of waiting until the next morning when a coordinator opens the inbox. Appointment confirmations go out automatically. The system handles the routine, and the coordinators focus on what actually needs a human: complex insurance situations, patients who need extra help, anything that doesn't fit a template.
The result isn't that the coordinators do less. It's that they do better work. The calls they make now are the ones that need judgment, empathy, and experience. The audiologists walk into appointments already knowing who they're about to see.
It's a small practice. Adding headcount isn't always the answer. Getting more out of the people and systems already in place usually is.
AI intake doesn't replace the care that goes into running a good audiology practice. It just handles the parts that didn't need a person to begin with.