General Practitioners (GPs), and practice partners in particular, certainly don’t have it easy. It’s not just a case of the notoriously long hours that doctors work. GPs are often in effect doing at least two jobs at once.
Their primary role is obviously to provide medical care to their patients, for which they receive extensive training. But GP partners are also responsible for running their practice as a business. This side of the job has become harder and harder in recent years, what with the financial fall-out of the COVID-19 pandemic, NHS funding disputes, and declining numbers of partners even as patient numbers increase.
The management of a GP practice is far from straightforward, especially when it comes to finance. Yet, unlike medicine, it’s not something many doctors have formal training in. This is one reason why the Xeinadin Group includes professional accountants who specialise in healthcare finance and offer industry-specific services tailored to the unique demands of GP practices.
But while third-party support plays a critical role in helping GPs manage the burden of financial management, particularly around the more technical aspects, practitioners want to feel they have a grasp on things themselves.
This is where technology can make all the difference for hard-pressed partners and practice managers. And of all the technologies out there, the one promising to empower GPs most effectively in the tricky area of financial management is AI.
Ready-made help
Perhaps the best thing about turning to AI to level up your practice management is that you don’t have to think about investing in and learning to use whole new systems, which is the usual pathway to adopting new technologies. What makes the AI revolution unique is the way it is being layered on top of existing systems.
So if your practice uses Microsoft Office, you will already have Microsoft’s Copilot AI as part of your subscription. If you use Google Workspace, you will have Gemini. For GP practices, this is ideal. There’s no extra cost, no worries about onboarding new technology, no learning how to use new platforms. It’s just a case of learning how to use an additional set of tools in applications you are already familiar with.
Learning how to use these tools is well worth the effort. AI is excellent at many things, but most notably the way it can assimilate data from lots of different places at once, connect processes so they run smoothly together, and automate tasks. Applied to financial management and general business administration, this means AI makes it easier to see what is happening everywhere at once, helps improve efficiency and accuracy, and eases the burden of time-consuming repetitive tasks.
For example, if you still rely on spreadsheets like Excel and Sheets for financial record-keeping, Copilot and Gemini can offer formula suggestions, automate your pivot tables, turn endless lists of numbers into attractive, easy-to-understand charts for reports and presentations – tasks that might otherwise take hours to do manually.
Both AI models are woven into apps right across their respective suites. So it’s not just spreadsheets they offer assistance with. They’re right on hand when you’re writing emails, creating a text document or slideshow, even when you’re in a meeting. These connections mean Gemini and Copilot can do things like automate the entire invoicing process, from creating invoices in the first place from spreadsheet data to emailing them out and confirming payment. Previously, this is something you needed specialist accounting software to do.
They can also be used to make your financial reporting more transparent and accurate, flagging anomalies between forecasts and actuals, helping with reconciliations, and automating financial data flows across departments. Think fewer manual checks, more strategic oversight.
For hard-working GPs who already don’t feel they have enough hours in the day, it’s easy to hear the hype about how technologies like AI can help them and think, yes great, but when am I going to find time to find, acquire and learn to use this? That’s what is so attractive about the likes of Gemini and Copilot. If you’re already using Microsoft Office or Google Workspace, they offer a ready-made way to bring AI into your existing routines and processes.
