Hi, I'm Scott Morris and this is the June 2026 column for AI and I care. Well, this month I want to talk a little bit about how do we transform I care operations with technologies like artificial intelligence? Let me start out with saying this, the modern I care practice is suffering from a self-inflicted operational hemorrhage and the industry's favorite tourniquet is just simply put, a lie. For over a decade, practice leaders have defended this bloated, high-friction, waiting room routine under the guise of protecting the human touch or accommodating the tech adverse older demographics.
Well, that's BS. Well, let me dismantle that and excuse once and for all that's a myth from like 2016. Today's older adults are smart phone savvy. They manage their banking, coordinate their travel, communicate with their families, all digitally.
To claim they can't handle automated intake, that's just lazy, traditionalism disguised as empathy. The reality, the greatest threat to the human connection and I care isn't technology. It's this catastrophic operational drag that our current administrative workflows put us through because candidly our system is just flat out broke. So if you walk into the average ophthalmic practice today, you'll witness a profound misuse of human capital.
Highly trained clinical staff and front desk professionals are routinely forced at like expensive manual data entry bots. They spend the first 10 or 20 minutes of every patient encounter wrestling with clinical industry taking, manual demographic verification and really archaic insurance eligibility checking. This is crazy. This is not benign administrative baseline.
It's what I call a systemic crisis. This 20 minute friction point results in a lot of challenges of which let's talk about the big three. First is leaked revenue. When every patient starts to visit 15 minutes behind schedule due to intake bottlenecks, the entire day schedule is artificially just throttled down.
You're going to see fewer patients and bill fewer hours simply because your front door has become your biggest friction point and your 15 minutes behind before you even start. Number two is what I call data atrophy. Manual transcription is really just a playground or sandbox for a lot of human air. When we listen to somebody and then take it in and then have to transpose and put her own language, sometimes things get lost.
Let's face it, most of the time things get lost. Crucial clinical data, secondary insurance policies and patient histories are routinely dropped lost to entered incorrectly between the clipboard and the actual EHR. And what did both of those end up resulting in these friction points is staff burnout. And we wonder why healthcare faces an unprecedented retention crisis?
It's because we hired passionate patient-centric individuals and then forced them to endure this cognitive fatigue of correcting messian intake notes and arguing with insurance portals of which we never win. The result the patient experience begins with a state of mutual frustration. The clinician starts to examine already behind schedule staring at a screen instead of looking at the patient. What would be more empathetic?
Maybe changing what we do to spend more time face to face. So true innovation is not about making bad processes faster. It's about making them obsolete. And this is where AI and some other innovative technologies are moving from this tech-bro buzzword to general operational alchemy.
And I think it is a transmutation of administrative lead, I'm sorry administrative lead, into clinical goal. To understand the scale of the shift, we must look at the direct contrast between our current operational failures and the AI-driven feature across the three critical pillars of intake, insurance and education. Let's focus on intake first. So we currently endure, as I said before, what we refer to as I refer to as a legacy nightmare where patients are forced to fill out redundant paperwork or rest those clunky outdated patient portal by sitting in the waiting room.
The reality is there is a better way. Advanced conversational AI platforms can engage patients days before the appointment. In the comfort of their own homes, we can actually get the real data and they can go look up a medication that they're on or think about what their symptoms were instead of being rushed through the exam. This tech uses seamless and intuitive mobile interfaces that guarantee standardized data collection and eliminates waiting room friction and ensures much better data completeness.
All of this done before the patient ever steps foot in practice. Let us deal with number two. Number two is insurance and we all know how well that works. In so many offices, the front desk staff spent hours, manual scanning cards, typing in alpha numeric codes, and sitting on hold with insurance payers just to verify basic eligibility.
Why? Well, I don't know. I mean, there are already intelligent AI engines that are autonomously querying clearing houses and payer databases to instantly verify benefits, deductibles and copays. This tech can eliminate unexpected billing surprises and dramatically slash claimed denials while at the same time instantly identifying coordination of benefits.
And then last but not least, we talk about education or maybe a better way to say it would be targeting kind of market pre-visit marketing. In today's, let's call it old school model, patients arrive entirely cold. This means they're completely unaware, specialized testing they may need, advanced lens options, available drive therapies, and so they're already in the exam chair. I mean, picture this.
The future might look a conversational platform that delivers tailored, compliant, pre-visit education directly to the patient based on their specific chief complaint and questions that they're dancers part of their intake. Imagine how this would elevate clinical awareness long before the exam. This resulted in much higher conversion rates for premium, out-of-pocket services, and really a hyper-informed patient who's ready to make decisions about what's best for them. Now, I think there's a huge paradox of implementing AI and I care operations is that automation is only a thing, maybe the only thing left that can save the human experience.
When an autonomous platform handles the data heavy lifting before the patient ever walks through the door, the entire anatomy of the visit changes. In this scenario, AI is a tool that improves the experience and removes friction points. The patient doesn't arrive frustrated, they arrive prepared. The technician doesn't rush to pre-test, they focus on the patient, the person, and most importantly, the doctor and the doctor time is liberated.
So instead of spending the first half an exam validating demographic data, typing out a patient's self-reported history to provide a good look to the patient in the eye and have a discussion human to human. Value but clinical time is reclaimed and reinvested where it actually matters, discussing advanced pathology, explaining complex disease management, exploring refractive options, and most importantly of all, building trust. Now, there's always going to be clinical outliers and exceptions and for those who are going, yeah, but there's always exceptions. Patient's who require steady human hand to guide them through their intake.
The building your entire operational model around the lowest common denominator of technological adoption is simply put a losing strategy. Improvements in practice efficiency, data security, and patient throughput are reason enough to evolve. The old model of eye care operations is broke. Y'all know it's broke.
We know it's broke. It's bloated and it's burning out everyone. It's time to stop hiding behind outdated excuses. Start contemplating, deploying administrative changes where we don't just optimize our practice.
We finally free our doctors to be doctors, our staff to be empathetic healers rather than dated processors, and more importantly, we optimize our practice where patients can have a better, more efficient, more effective, more educational, more experiential experience. Just the thought for today.