Weave’s 2026 State of Healthcare Pulse Survey: What healthcare practices are saying about manual work, staffing, and trust in AI

Marcus Bertilson, COO and Head of Product at Weave

If there’s one thing slowing healthcare practices down in 2026, it’s this: manual administrative work. Duplicate entries and systems that don’t work together are a drag on practices across dentistry, specialty medical, optometry, and veterinary practices.

That’s the central finding of Weave’s 2026 State of Healthcare Pulse Survey. Responses from 285 owners, office managers, and front desk staff showed us practices know what they need to improve efficiencies. But caution reigns supreme in an industry that prioritizes patient data privacy.

Three glaring needs emerged:

1. Improving front office optimization and reducing manual workloads;
2. Standardizing on interoperable technology; and
3. Implementing AI once the right vendor is identified.
   Don’t mistake operators’ caution for reluctance. It’s a rational response to an AI market that hasn’t yet earned their trust with patient data. The opportunity belongs to whoever proves they deserve it.

The bottleneck of manual tasks

Ask a practice what’s costing them time, and you won’t get a vague answer. Eighty percent of respondents say duplicate data entry impacts their workflow, and for nearly half of them (47%), that impact is moderate or significant. 

The clock backs it up. Nearly two-thirds of respondents (63%) spend an hour or more each day on manual data entry, and roughly a third (32%) spend two hours or more. Multiply that across every individual at the front office and across a year, and the cost of re-keying information is measured in weeks of staff time that never interact with a patient.

Practices are specific about where they want relief, too. The tasks they most want automated cluster tightly around the front desk: appointment scheduling and confirmations (49%), insurance verification (46%), patient intake and forms (42%), and billing and payment reminders (41%). These are the repetitive, rules-based workflows that eat away the day — and the ones best suited to being handled automatically.

The root cause sits underneath all of it: seventy percent of practices are not running an integrated software stack. When systems don’t share information, someone has to move it by hand. That’s how the same patient detail ends up entered three times in three places. If you can close the integration gap, much of the manual burden closes with it.

Why more hiring won’t help

The obvious response to too much work is to add people. The labor market has other ideas.

Sixty-four percent of practices experienced staffing shortages in the past 12 months, and 48% are dealing with them right now. For nearly a quarter of respondents (24%), those shortages are severe enough to force reduced patient or appointment volume. At that point, an operational headache becomes lost revenue and turned-away patients.

Replacing people is slow, too. More than half of practices take three weeks or longer to fill an open role, and many even stretch past a month or two. In a front office running lean, three empty weeks is three weeks of the remaining team absorbing the overflow. Situations like this are a fast track to the burnout that drives the next departure.

So the fix can’t be “add headcount.” It has to be technology that extends the team a practice already has. Among practices that automated workflows in 2025, 41% cite improved team productivity and efficiency and 29% report reduced staff workload and burnout. Automation isn’t replacing the front desk. It’s giving the team its day back.

That distinction matters, because it’s the one practices are watching for. A striking 82% say AI has had no meaningful impact on their staffing needs. Read that as reassurance, not indifference: the technology practices are adopting is augmenting their teams, not thinning them. The “AI takes jobs” fear that stalls adoption simply isn’t showing up in the numbers here. 

AI is the growth lever. Trust is the hurdle

Interest in AI is real, and it’s growing. Roughly 41% of practices have already adopted some AI workflows or say AI is transforming their operations. Another 33% have considered AI tools but haven’t committed. That tells us there’s a large, movable population that sees the value and is waiting for a reason to say yes.

What’s holding them at the threshold isn’t skepticism about the payoff. It’s patient data. HIPAA and data privacy concerns top the list of risk factors at 60%, followed by the fear of AI doing low-quality work (51%) and regulatory uncertainty (35%). These aren’t the objections of people who don’t understand AI. They’re the objections of people who understand exactly what’s at stake if it goes wrong on protected health information.

The immaturity of AI governance underlines the same point. Fifty-eight percent of practices have no formal AI governance structure, and 48% leave AI strategy sitting on the practice owner’s desk. Practices know they need guardrails; most just don’t have them yet. Vendors who bring the guardrails with the product will be the vendors that win.

Caution is a scorecard, not a stop sign

Put the three findings together, and the picture is clear. Practices have named manual work and disconnected systems as their bottleneck. They can’t staff their way out of it, because the labor market won’t let them. And they’re ready to adopt AI to close the gap when the right vendor earns their confidence with patient data.

The caution running through all of it isn’t reluctance. It’s criteria. Practices are telling the market precisely what it will take to win them: technology that’s verticalized to how healthcare actually works, built for data privacy and security, and integrated deeply enough to end the re-keying for good.

The demand is here. The trust isn’t…yet. The opportunity belongs to whoever earns it.

Check out Weave’s Predictions for the Next Decade of Healthcare Practices