AdvancedMD CEO Amanda Sharp said that the independent practice software provider is deploying artificial intelligence tools to reduce after-hours medical charting, known as “pajama time,” and streamline complex billing cycles.
The Economic Toll of After-Hours Documentation
The modern independent medical practice faces a quiet financial bleed that starts long after the clinic doors lock. Physicians routinely spend their evenings finishing electronic health record charts—an unpaid administrative burden that drains productivity and accelerates burnout. For Amanda Sharp, chief executive officer at AdvancedMD, targeting this friction point offers an immediate operational win.
Instead of promising a distant reinvention of medicine, the company is focusing on immediate relief. According to Sharp, AI-assisted transcription populates patient charts while leaving clinicians fully responsible for review and approval. “Our foot in the door tends to be on the clinical side,” Sharp told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster.
Here is the math: a solo practitioner or small medical group operates on tight margins where every hour spent typing notes is an hour lost to patient care or financial management. By cutting down documentation time, practices protect their labor capacity without requiring complex return-on-investment models.
The Bottom Line
Immediate Relief: AI transcription tools reduce evening charting burdens, directly addressing physician burnout.
Revenue Recovery: Integration with Waystar brings automated coverage detection, claims processing, and denial management directly into the AdvancedMD portal.
Human Oversight Maintained: Automation handles repetitive sorting and flags exceptions, but final clinical and financial decisions remain strictly in human hands.
Bridging the Gap From Clinical Charts to Payment Realization
Fixing the clinical workflow is only the first step. The heavier economic lift happens after the chart closes, when a patient visit enters the labyrinth of eligibility checks, coding decisions, contracted rates, and insurance denials.
Independent practices must navigate the same complex payment architecture as massive health systems, yet they carry leaner back-office teams and possess virtually zero tolerance for uncollected revenue. When a claim is denied or reimbursed below contracted rates, smaller groups often absorb the loss because chasing the appeal consumes more staff hours than the practice can spare.
“Anything that has large amounts of data with repetitive tasks, that’s where AI really shines,” Sharp noted. Following a strategic expansion with Waystar in July, the AdvancedMD portal now incorporates automated coverage detection, claims processing, denial management, remittance tracking, and patient-estimate generation.
Rather than replacing staff, these tools shift employees away from mechanical data entry and toward high-value exception handling. Practices can now anticipate denials before they materialize, altering the financial health of independent clinics across the healthcare sector.
Financial Overview of Practice Automation Tools
| Operational Area | Traditional Workflow | AI-Integrated Workflow |
|---|---|---|
| Clinical Documentation | Manual entry during and after clinic hours (“pajama time”) | AI-assisted transcription with human review and approval |
| Claims & Denials | Reactive manual appeals and written reconciliation | Predictive denial management and automated sorting |
| Patient Financials | Disconnected estimation and manual posting | Integrated portal estimates and automated remittance |
Evaluating Market Adoption and the Future of Independent Medicine
Sharp described the current market as sitting firmly in an “early adopter phase,” characterized by immense enthusiasm on one side and considerable skepticism on the other. Concerns over cybersecurity, regulatory compliance, and patient data privacy require native software integration rather than external plug-ins.
During the discussion, Webster raised a fundamental question regarding market structure: could lowering administrative barriers convince more physicians to open private practices rather than join hospital-employed networks?
While Sharp acknowledged that administrative overhead heavily influences career choices, she maintained a pragmatic stance on industry trends. Technology simplifies startup and operational hurdles, but the broader choice of medical independence remains an open question. For the physician closing a laptop at 10:30 at night, however, the immediate victory is far simpler: getting paid accurately for care already delivered, and finally logging off.
