Before You Buy AI: The Smarter Way to Cut Admin Burden and Grow Your Practice Featuring Clark Van Oyen, EP 272
How much of your team's day disappears into phone calls, faxes, and data entry? If you're like most practice owners, the honest answer is: more than you'd like to admit. In this episode of The Thriving Practice Podcast, Tracy Cherpeski sits down with Clark Van Oyen, founder of Cortico Health — a company that has helped nearly 10,000 healthcare professionals reduce administrative burden through smart automation and better workflow design.
Clark's path into healthcare began with a single pediatric clinic buried under 800 phone calls a day. He built them an online booking system, brought those calls down to nearly zero, and discovered a problem shared by practices everywhere. His company's mission today: isolate, understand, and eliminate anything that pulls healthcare professionals away from patient care.
Whether you're exploring medical practice automation for the first time, trying to run a successful medical practice without burning out your team, or wondering whether AI is worth the hype, this conversation offers a clear-eyed, outcomes-first framework for deciding what your practice actually needs.
Key Takeaways
Booking is the single biggest time drain. Roughly 40 percent of clinical support staff time goes to scheduling — far more than billing, reminders, or fax management — which makes online self-booking the highest-impact fix for most practices.
Admin burden has a visible side and an invisible side. Pain points are only the part you notice; a time-and-motion review of where hours actually go reveals the burden your team has stopped seeing.
AI is a tool, not a strategy. Voice AI phone systems fully resolve only about half of patient calls, while online booking can approach 90 to 100 percent. Use AI only where it's genuinely the best tool for the job.
Hold vendors accountable for outcomes, not methods. Define the result you want — more booked appointments at lower cost, fewer phone calls — and measure whether your vendor actually delivers it.
Your website is your practice's front door. Mobile-friendly design, posted patient handouts, and a clear path to online booking cost little and quietly remove entire categories of phone calls.
Q&A
How much time do physicians spend on administrative tasks?
Clark cites an average of about 11 hours per week per physician from the Canadian Medical Association — and notes that between after-hours paperwork and the hidden work of delegating, admin can consume a large share of a clinician's working life, especially in the U.S., where billing complexity multiplies the load.
What is the biggest source of admin burden in a medical practice?
Scheduling. About 40 percent of all support staff time goes to booking patients by phone, based on Cortico Health's studies across its customer base. Billing, reminders, fax management, patient inquiries, and follow-ups each account for roughly 10 percent.
Should my practice use AI to answer the phones?
Not necessarily. Current voice AI systems fully contain only about 50 to 60 percent of patient calls — the rest still escalate to your staff. Online booking, by contrast, can handle 90 to 100 percent of scheduling without a phone call at all, which is why Clark recommends starting there.
How can I reduce admin burden without buying new software?
Start with your website. Make sure it works on a smartphone — where roughly 80 percent of patients visit from — post your patient handouts, and point visitors clearly to online booking if you offer it. These basics eliminate whole categories of routine calls at essentially no cost.
Episode Highlights
Clark's origin story: a Harvard-trained clinic founder, 12 doctors, and 800 phone calls a day
From one clinic's proprietary tool to nearly 10,000 healthcare professionals served
Visible versus invisible admin burden — and why pain points don't tell the whole story
Slicing staff admin into buckets: booking, billing, reminders, faxes, inquiries, and follow-ups
Tracy's client story: the orthodontic practice whose automations made daily huddles possible — and kept staff for five years on average
The clinic that grew from 12 to 22 physicians in 18 months after moving booking online
IVR containment: the metric that exposes the limits of AI phone systems
Where AI genuinely earns its keep: fax parsing and clinician-side tasks like chart prep
The path toward near-zero admin overhead — and the vision of a clinician fully present with every patient
Clark's parting advice: your website is the mouth of the funnel
Memorable Quotes
“Our mission is to isolate, understand and eliminate anything that's taking healthcare professionals away from helping patients.” — Clark Van Oyen
“How do you ever carve out space to be proactive in a medical practice? It's the most chaotic business on the planet.” — Clark Van Oyen
“Hold your vendors accountable for outcomes, not for their methods.” — Clark Van Oyen
“AI should be used if and only if it's the best tool for the job, for every little point in the workflow.” — Clark Van Oyen
“Ideally a clinician just shows up and spends all their time fully present with their patient, and everything else is taken care of.” — Clark Van Oyen
Clark Van Oyen offers a refreshing counterweight to the AI hype cycle: technology should serve outcomes, and outcomes should be measured. For practice owners who feel buried under phone calls and paperwork, the way forward isn't the flashiest tool — it's an honest assessment of where the time is going, a fix for the biggest lever first, and vendors who own results alongside you. If this conversation resonated, share it with a colleague who's still charting in their pajamas.
Want to keep the conversation going? Join us for a free AI roundtable featuring Dr. Sarah Baldwin, a physician who has used automation to reshape her own practice. We'll talk through how to decide which tools actually earn a place in your practice — and which ones don't. Save your spot on August 18, 2026, Register here at PracticeSuccess.co/SmartPractice
Guest Bio:
Clark Van Oyen grew up on a farm in British Columbia, spending his childhood writing code — a combination he credits with making him both resourceful and methodical. After studying physics at UBC and building a career in tech, his connection to healthcare through his wife and colleagues opened his eyes to an industry running on software 20 years out of date — costing providers time, causing frustration, and worst of all, harming health outcomes. Then a clinic owner buried under 800 phone calls a day asked him a simple question: why can't patients just book online? Clark built the answer, watched the calls all but disappear, and Cortico was born. Today the platform serves 400+ clinics across Canada, the U.S., and beyond, automating up to 84% of repetitive administrative tasks with one mission: isolate, understand, and eliminate anything that pulls healthcare professionals away from patient care.
Find Clark:
Website: Cortico.Health
Instagram @CorticoHealth
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