The Threat of AI to Admin Staff in Healthcare: What’s the Real Deal?

Ever since OpenAI dropped ChatGPT, there’s been a lot of buzz and excitement around Generative AI. And let’s be honest, some folks are even slapping the AI label on basic workflow automation just to ride the Gen-AI wave. Over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing my thoughts on Generative AI through a series of articles. But to kick things off, let’s dive into a question I keep hearing from people in administrative roles at doctors' offices—Office Managers, Secretaries, Receptionists, you name it: Will your job still be around in the next 3-5 years? And if not, what’s the game plan?

Here’s my take: with the right rollout of Gen-AI, the roles of admin staff in a doctor’s office are definitely going to shrink. Now, to really get where I’m coming from, we need to break down what admin staff typically do in a clinic or doctor's office.

Communication: A huge chunk of time for Office Secretaries and Receptionists is spent communicating—with patients, with providers, and with just about anyone else needing to get in touch. But AI is set to change the game. For instance, triage is a big deal in specialist offices. Admin staff often handle the preliminary sorting and tagging of incoming referrals, letters, lab reports, and prescription refill requests—most of which still arrive as faxes (and rarely by email or other written forms). In a primary care setting, this isn’t as big of a deal since you don’t typically need a referral to see a primary care physician. But with AI-powered automation tools like #AutoTriage from RexEMR Inc , managing the inbox could soon be a thing of the past for admin staff. These tools are already clocking in at around 90-95% accuracy, and as Large Language Models (LLMs) get better, this is only going to improve.

Telephone Calls: Then there are all those phone calls—either made or received by admin staff—between the office and patients. AI-powered voice bots and omni-channel experiences are starting to take over here too. Goodbye, voicemail and outdated call trees! Products like RexEMR's #RexConnect are evolving fast and will reduce the need for staff to manage this activity. We’ve seen chatbots evolve rapidly over the past decade, and voice bots are next in line. They’re well on their way to replacing the need for humans to answer patient queries over the phone.

The Bottom Line? Communication is a core activity for Office Managers and admin staff, but with Gen-AI products and features stepping in, this aspect of the job will definitely see a reduction. Exception handling—managing the cases that AI can’t fully handle—will likely become centralized. This could mean fewer roles, but more specialized ones focusing on unique cases.

Stay tuned! In the next article, we’ll dive deeper into other activities that admin staff handle and how AI is set to change the landscape.

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