A Practical Guide to Cutting 18 Hours of Admin Time Every Week

NHS England’s Long Term Workforce Plan guidance underscores a clear opportunity hiding in plain sight: automation of administrative tasks could unlock enormous time savings across the healthcare workforce. Evidence collated in the accompanying brief shows that more than 70 percent of a clinician’s working day is lost to paperwork and call-handling, and that up to 44 percent of this workload in general practice could be mostly or fully automated through current tools and technologies. From documentation to task chasing—much of which is ripe for automation.

Simultaneously, patients expect same-day answers and zero wait-time on the phone, pressures that manual workflows simply cannot absorb. The market has therefore tipped: speech recognition, transformer-based language models and cloud-ready telephony now combine safely under GDPR and HIPAA, making enterprise-scale automation a present-day option rather than a future aspiration.

This convergence of workforce strain, rising patient expectations, and mature advance infrastructure signals a turning point for healthcare operations. What was once a theoretical efficiency gain is now a tangible opportunity for clinical and financial optimisation. The automation of low-value tasks is no longer just about reducing admin, it is about unlocking billable hours, extending clinical capacity, and reducing cost-per-contact across the board. As NHS England accelerates its digital and workforce transformation agendas, the economic case becomes even more compelling. That brings us to the numbers.

The Business Case: Time Literally Equals Money

What does 18 reclaimed hours translate to in financial terms?

The King’s Fund estimates that in 2023/24 the average 10-minute face-to-face GP consultation costs the NHS £37. An hour of recovered clinician time therefore equates to roughly six additional appointments, worth about £222; multiply that by 18 and a single practice opens capacity for more than £4 000 of billable care each week, before counting gains in quality or staff morale. With typical SaaS licence fees running far below that figure, most clinics reach a positive cash-flow position inside the first month of deployment. The Care Quality Commission has made clear that digitally-enabled care “can offer significant benefits” and that regulation “should not stand in the way of innovation” as long as safety and person-centred care remain paramount

These economics make a strong case, but cost savings alone are not enough. For automation to deliver real-world value, solutions must also meet the highest standards of safety, auditability, and compliance. That’s where operational fit becomes just as critical as financial return. Beyond the immediate uplift in clinical capacity, the right tools simplify inspection readiness, reduce legal exposure, and enhance governance, all without adding friction to frontline workflows. Which brings us to what implementation can look like in practice.

A Practical Guide to Cutting Admin Time

This is precisely where Motics delivers value beyond automation. Designed for healthcare from the ground up, Motics pairs clinical-grade AI with secure, enterprise-ready infrastructure, ensuring that the financial upside is matched by operational integrity.

Motics was born for this moment. Its Scribe Agent listens silently during consultations, drafting structured SOAP notes and pushing them straight into any major EHR. Pilot sites record a median 2.1 clinical hours saved per doctor per day in the first eight weeks. The Phone Agent behaves like an always-on receptionist, answering calls in two seconds and resolving four out of five routine booking queries without escalation. Meanwhile the Email Agent slashes reply times by 83 %, giving ops teams an extra hour daily while drafting GDPR-compliant responses that sync automatically to patient records. Because the three agents share a common data model, each action like call, note, email, lands in the same patient record without double entry. Motics deploys via secure API, completing technical integration while making low change-management friction as clinicians remain in control: they review and complete each note. Early-adopter sites saw adoption climb, aided by in-workflow coaching prompts that guide staff through first-use scenarios.

Motics meets the bar with ISO 27001, certified hosting, full audit trails, and encryption of data both in transit and at rest. Because every interaction is logged directly to the source record, inspection prep shifts from multi-day effort to a simple screen export.

If reclaiming clinical time is on your priority list, the path is straightforward: book a demo to watch a real call handled in two seconds, or compare features against generic scribes on our detailed checklist.

Published by the Motics Editorial Team