Phones get overwhelmed as you’re rescheduling and backfilling canceled appointments. Rechecking insurance and eligibility takes even more staff time. Prior authorization submissions and follow-ups are tedious and impede care. 

These and other front-office tasks happen hundreds or even thousands of times per week in medical practices. When they rely on manual work, the tracking, return calls, scanning, and other tasks consume staff hours that could be spent on patient service. 

Even if you know there are opportunities to automate or use AI to alleviate the burdens on you and your staff, you might be unclear on where to start. 

Our Feb. 10, 2026, MGMA Stat poll gives a sense where your peers in other practices are circling back to AI and automation to improve access with cost-effective strategies. Atop the list was scheduling (31%), followed by calls (27%), registration/eligibility (23%), prior authorization (16%), and “other” (5%). The poll had 177 applicable responses. [Editor's note: The figures do not total 100% due to rounding.]

What you told us: AI and automation focus areas 

• Scheduling: These practice leaders emphasized adding patient self‑scheduling, with a strong focus on filling gaps and canceled appointments, improving slot utilization, and using AI to manage waitlists and automate same‑day or priority scheduling. 
• Calls: Practices looking to add AI or automation for calls are primarily focused on voice bots/IVR systems for call routing, along with automating voicemail‑to‑task functions such as appointment changes, clinical message handling, and prescription requests. Many also aim to reduce call volume by having AI handle initial intake, manage routine questions, and guide patients toward self‑service options like a portal. 
• Registration/eligibility: These practices are primarily focused on automating insurance verification and eligibility checks, with some also emphasizing digital intake/forms and expanding bot coverage across more payers. 
• Prior authorization: In practices focused on automating prior auth submission, respondents said they are focused on applying payer‑specific rules, and improving status tracking, including rapid denial notifications and case flagging. 

What practices have been doing 

The past year was less about experimenting and more about putting tools into production. A Sept. 30, 2025, MGMA Stat poll found 68% of medical groups reported adding or expanding AI tools in 2025. Practices gravitated toward high-friction, high-volume work where staffing pressure is constant — documentation support, patient communications, and scheduling-related workflows. 

At the same time, our polling continued to show that many “digital front door” capabilities remain underused by patients. A July 2025 poll found 71% of practices have fewer than 25% of patients using digital tools to self-schedule, while only 3% reported more than 75% adoption. That gap between capability and utilization is a major reason “scheduling” keeps showing up as a top operational focus. 

Conversational AI is even earlier in the curve. An April 2025 poll found only 19% of medical group practices use a chatbot or virtual assistant for patient communication. For most organizations, the opportunity today is still basic: use automation to reduce avoidable calls, reduce hold times, and route patients to the right channel without creating dead ends. 

Scheduling: make capacity usable before you “AI” it 

ROI on scheduling usually has less to do with “which tool” and more with whether your practice has made scheduling rules stable enough to automate safely. Our access reporting has pointed to an execution gap: practices pursue new tools, but don’t fully enable them — or don’t align templates, visit types, and guardrails so the tools can match demand to capacity. 

A move that can pay off quickly is investing in governance: tighten visit-type definitions, standardize durations, reduce one-off exceptions, and clarify what can be scheduled digitally versus what requires staff triage. In other words, AI can help scale up agreed-upon rules, or it scales up inconsistency. 

Once those foundations are stable, the highest-return automations are not flashy: automated waitlist fills, self-rescheduling for cancellations, and nudges that convert abandoned scheduling attempts into completed bookings, especially after hours. Self-scheduling adoption is still uneven, which is exactly why tightening workflows and then expanding safe self-service can unlock real capacity without adding headcount. 

Calls: fix routing and visibility, then add automation 

If your phones are melting down, don’t start with a chatbot. Start with the plumbing: queueing, routing rules, callback options, and analytics that let you see where demand spikes, where calls abandon, and which call types are consuming the most staff time. Then use automation to deflect the repetitive work (basic appointment tasks, confirmations, directions, simple FAQs) while keeping an easy path to a human for anything clinical, sensitive, or complex. 

This sequencing matters because conversational tools don’t fix broken workflows — they expose them. Our 2025 AI snapshot highlighted how practices are using AI to “document, schedule, and communicate,” and the communication layer tends to work best when it’s tied to solid operational rules, not vague promises of “automation.” 

Registration and eligibility: win by preventing rework 

Improvement in registration and eligibility yields savings everywhere: fewer check-in surprises, fewer downstream claim problems, fewer patient balance disputes, and fewer staff touches per visit.  

Two-stage control works well here: verify at scheduling and verify again close to the visit (because coverage changes), with automation pushing exceptions into prioritized work queues rather than letting mismatches arrive at the front desk. 

Prior auth: standardize intake, automate the packet, reduce “status chasing” 

Prior authorization remains one of the clearest “automation or bust” pressure points because practices are already staffing around it. In a past MGMA Annual Regulatory Burden Report, 92% of surveyed medical group practices hired or reassigned staff solely to handle prior auth volume — a staggering signal of how much operating capacity has been diverted into administrative throughput. 

CAQH’s index report gives time context that might help your decision-making: providers reported spending 11 minutes conducting a prior authorization electronically and 16 minutes via a portal on average, so “going digital” isn’t always efficient when workflows are fragmented across payer portals and manual documentation assembly. 

“Other” opportunities to address no-shows and self-rescheduling 

The best AI and automation often help practices recover capacity they already have. No-shows are a classic example: They hit access, provider productivity, and patient experience at the same time. Our August 2025 poll found 73% of medical practices reported no-show rates stayed the same or decreased in 2025 relative to the year before. Even with that stability, the opportunity is reducing preventable no-shows and making it easy for patients to reschedule rather than disappear. 

How to choose the highest-return investments in 2026 

One reason front-office automation disappoints is that organizations buy tools before they decide what “good” looks like operationally or build the governance that helps practices cross from “we bought AI” to “we run AI safely.” Our Jan. 20 poll found 42% of leaders said their organization has (or is developing) AI governance or a formal AI-use policy. For front-office use cases — where patient access, privacy, and service recovery are always on the line — governance isn’t bureaucracy; it’s how practice leaders prevent a tool from creating more exceptions than it resolves.