A widely cited McKinsey Global Institute study found that knowledge workers spend close to 20% of their working week, nearly a full day, just searching for information and tracking down colleagues who might have it. A related figure from the same research put total time spent on email, searching, and internal collaboration at around 28 hours a week, well over half of a standard working week, on activities that produce no output of their own.
The study wasn’t about clinics, or even healthcare. It was about how much time gets lost inside organisations whenever the information people need is scattered across different places instead of sitting somewhere easy to find.
have, rather than the ones they’re chasing.
The honest answer is that most practice management software is very good at one thing and only adequate at another. It’s built to store and organise patient data reliably. It’s rarely built to act on that data without a person driving every step.
Most clinics don’t run on one system. There’s the practice management software holding clinical records and appointment history. Often a separate tool for reminders or messaging. Sometimes a spreadsheet somewhere tracking a specific list a staff member built manually. Occasionally, the most reliable record of who’s overdue for something is simply what a long-serving receptionist remembers.
None of these tools are the problem individually. The problem is what happens at the seams between them: a staff member trying to answer a simple question, like “which patients matching this criteria haven’t been contacted yet,” ends up checking two or three different places to piece together an answer that should have taken seconds.
This kind of cost is easy to underestimate because it never shows up as one large, visible expense. It shows up as small, constant friction: a few minutes here checking a spreadsheet, a few minutes there cross-referencing a list against the practice management system, repeated by multiple staff members, multiple times a day, every day of the year.
Multiplied across a full working week, the McKinsey research suggests that friction isn’t marginal. Applied to a clinic, it’s the difference between reception staff spending their time on patients in front of them, or spending a meaningful share of the week reconstructing information that already exists somewhere in the clinic’s own systems.
It’s tempting to think the answer is simply collecting more information, or adding another tool to track something new. In practice, that usually makes the underlying problem worse, not better, because it adds one more place information can live instead of consolidating what’s already there. The actual fix isn’t more data. It’s fewer places that data has to be checked before someone can act on it.
A single, reliable view, built around the criteria a clinic actually cares about, does more to save time than any individual new tool layered on top of an already fragmented system.
The McKinsey research is over a decade old at this point, but the underlying pattern hasn’t gone away, if anything, most organisations run on more separate tools today than they did then, not fewer. For a clinic specifically, the practical takeaway isn’t about the exact number of hours. It’s the reminder that scattered information has a real, ongoing cost, even when no single instance of it feels significant, and that consolidating around one reliable source is usually worth more than it looks like on paper.
Source: McKinsey Global Institute, “The Social Economy: Unlocking Value and Productivity Through Social Technologies” (2012).
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