Giving 2,300 clinicians their evenings back.
A twelve-facility health network was drowning in referral paperwork. We automated the administrative layer around care — intake, referrals, prior authorizations — so clinical staff could spend their hours on patients, not portals.
Challenge
Every referral at Horizon touched an average of six staff members and took nineteen days to complete. Nurses spent the last two hours of every shift on data entry across three portals. Staff turnover in administrative roles hit 40% a year, and patient satisfaction scores were sliding for reasons that had nothing to do with care quality.
Approach
Healthcare automation fails when it's imposed on clinicians rather than designed with them. We ran discovery inside two facilities — shadowing intake desks, charting where every referral stalled — and ranked automation candidates by hours returned to staff, not by technical elegance.
Solution
An automation layer that reads incoming referrals, extracts and validates clinical data, routes them to the right specialty queue, and pre-fills prior-authorization requests for human review. Staff approve, edit, or escalate — the system never decides care, it eliminates the clerical work around it.
Outcome
“For the first time in years, our nurses leave on time. That sentence alone justified the entire program.”