For most medical groups, labor is one of the largest operating expenses and one of the hardest areas to manage.
The question is not simply whether a practice is “overstaffed” or “understaffed.”
The better question is whether the right work is being done by the right people at the right point in the patient and revenue cycle.
Staffing benchmarks help turn that discussion from opinion into an operating model. When leadership compares staffing levels, compensation, call volume, patient access, referral volume, denial work, and collections activity against reputable healthcare benchmarks, patterns usually emerge quickly.
The front desk may be buried in phone work. Clinical staff may be performing administrative follow-up. Referral queues may be aging. Billing teams may be chasing preventable errors downstream.
That is where margin is often hiding.
Why Benchmarks Matter
Healthcare benchmarks from sources such as MGMA, AMGA, and other reputable operating resources can help practices evaluate whether staffing expense is aligned with volume, complexity, and performance.
But benchmarks should not be used as a blunt instrument to cut headcount.
They should be used to identify where staffing design, workflow, technology, and accountability are not matching the work required.
A practice may look expensive on payroll and still be understaffed in the wrong place. Another practice may have enough employees, but too much time tied up in manual scheduling, call handling, prior authorization, referral follow-up, charge correction, and denial rework.
In both cases, the issue is not just labor cost.
It is labor deployment.
1. Compare Staffing to Volume and Complexity
A practical staffing review should start with volume and complexity.
How many providers are being supported? How many visits are being completed? How many calls, referrals, portal messages, authorizations, patient balances, and denials are being handled each week?
Staffing should be evaluated against the actual work moving through the practice, not just the number of employees on payroll.
A high-volume primary care practice, ophthalmology group, surgical specialty, and procedural clinic may all need different support models. Benchmarks are useful, but they must be interpreted in context.
2. Identify Preventable Rework
Many staffing problems are really rework problems.
If the front desk misses eligibility, billing staff fix it later. If referrals are incomplete, clinical staff chase them before the visit. If documentation is delayed, claims sit. If authorizations are not owned clearly, patients, providers, and staff all feel the disruption.
Before adding staff, practices should ask:
What work is being repeated?
What errors are creating downstream cleanup?
What tasks are sitting in the wrong department?
What work could be centralized, automated, or reassigned?
The fastest way to improve margin is often to remove preventable work before adding more people to manage it.
3. Measure the Work Managers Actually Need to Manage
A practice manager cannot manage what is not measured.
Weekly dashboards should connect staffing effort to patient access, cash, and provider productivity. Useful measures may include call volume, abandoned calls, new-patient lag, referral aging, authorization aging, open encounters, days in A/R, denial volume, patient balance activity, and staffing cost as a percentage of collected revenue.
The goal is not to overwhelm managers with reports.
The goal is to make the operating model visible.
If leadership cannot see where work is backing up, staffing discussions will default to anecdotes, complaints, and pressure.
4. Use AI Carefully and Narrowly
AI and automation can help when they reduce repetitive administrative work without weakening compliance, patient trust, or payer documentation.
The best early use cases are usually narrow and measurable: call-center triage scripts, referral intake and routing, eligibility and authorization worklists, appointment reminders, patient-message categorization, denial trend analysis, and administrative document drafting.
The goal is not to replace judgment.
The goal is to remove avoidable manual work so staff can focus on patient access, clean handoffs, and revenue cycle follow-through.
Any AI workflow should have clear ownership, audit trails, escalation rules, and human review for patient-facing or payer-facing actions.
5. Be Careful With Offshoring and Third-Party Administrative Work
Offshoring or outsourcing administrative work can be helpful in some settings, but practices should be cautious when the work touches payer portals, Medicare or CMS-related workflows, protected health information, documentation, prior authorization, coding support, or patient communications.
Payer rules, data access, supervision, auditability, and compliance expectations can create gray areas.
Before shifting work externally, practices should review contractual obligations, HIPAA safeguards, payer portal rules, business associate arrangements, quality control, and escalation procedures.
A better model is often:
Benchmark first.
Redesign second.
Automate or outsource third.
Identify the staffing variance, map the workflow, remove preventable rework, and then decide whether AI, centralization, outsourcing, or additional staff will actually improve performance.
Bottom Line
Staffing benchmarks are not about cutting for the sake of cutting.
They are about understanding how labor supports access, quality, collections, and physician productivity.
When used correctly, benchmarks from sources such as MGMA and AMGA can help practices protect margin while improving the daily operating model for patients, providers, and staff.
The opportunity is not simply to spend less on labor.
The opportunity is to make sure the practice’s labor is pointed at the right work.
Oaklawn Health Group helps small and mid-sized medical practices evaluate staffing structure, profitability, revenue cycle performance, operations, compensation planning, start-ups, valuations, and transaction readiness. If your practice needs a practical staffing and margin review, contact Oaklawn Health Group to pressure-test the operating model before adding or cutting headcount.
FAQ:
Q: What staffing benchmarks should a medical practice review?
A: Practices should compare staffing levels, labor cost, support staff per provider, call volume, referral volume, authorization workload, revenue cycle activity, and patient access metrics against current healthcare benchmarks and the practice’s own volume and specialty mix.
Q: Should benchmarks be used to cut staff?
A: Not by themselves. Benchmarks should help identify whether staffing design, workflow, role clarity, technology, and accountability match the work required. A practice may be overstaffed in one area and understaffed in another.
Q: Can AI reduce medical practice staffing costs?
A: AI can reduce repetitive administrative work in areas such as routing, worklist creation, message categorization, denial trend review, and document drafting. It should be implemented with human oversight, audit trails, escalation rules, and compliance safeguards.
Q: Is offshoring safe for medical practice administration?
A: Offshoring can raise payer, CMS, HIPAA, data-access, quality-control, and supervision questions. Practices should review payer portal rules, contracts, business associate arrangements, quality standards, and escalation procedures before moving sensitive work externally.
Q: What is the best first step in a staffing review?
A: Start by measuring actual work volume: visits, calls, referrals, authorizations, portal messages, denials, patient balances, charge lag, and A/R activity. Then compare staffing to both benchmarks and workflow realities.