How to Automate Practice Fusion

The cloud chart made the small practice possible

Practice Fusion is a cloud electronic health record built for independent practices with one to five providers and no IT department. Family practice, primary care, pediatrics, and a long tail of small specialties: an allergy and immunology clinic is a good example, where the same patients come back weekly for injections for years.

It runs in a browser, updates itself, and needs no server in a cupboard, which is much of why a solo physician can have a certified record at all. The provider charts in it, the front desk schedules in it, and prescriptions and claims go out of it electronically.

For a practice that size the record is not one system among several. It is the system. There is no informatics team, no interface analyst and no queue for a request. Whoever is on the front desk this morning also follows up on everything the practice is waiting for.

The waiting is what actually costs the practice

Documentation is the part that gets discussed. Waiting is the part that causes harm.

An allergy panel is ordered and the report is meant to come back. A referral goes out to a dermatologist. A prior authorization for a biologic is filed on the insurer's site, and after that there is nothing to do but check it every few days. A claim comes back denied, and the reason sits on the payer's portal, one claim at a time.

None of those announce themselves. An open order that never closed appears nowhere. The chart records what was ordered and what arrived; the difference is what matters, and it is the one thing no screen puts in front of you.

So a small practice runs on somebody's memory and a paper list. That works, until the person keeping the list takes a week off, and a mammogram ordered in March is found in July.

Practice Fusion

Orders that never came back Every order placed weeks ago with no result attached, listed with the patient and the date, while it still matters clinically.

Authorizations with an answer Pending prior authorizations checked on each insurer's site each morning, with the ones still waiting ranked by age.

Denials as a working list The claim, the payer and the reason read off the payer portal into one list, rather than found one claim at a time.

Practice Fusion runs on what has already reached the chart

The record handles the clinical day well, and a practice paying for it should use all of this first.

Customizable charting templates cut the visit note down, and frequently ordered panels can be saved and reused. Certified e-prescribing sends prescriptions electronically, including controlled substances through EPCS. Lab and imaging orders go out from inside the chart to connected labs and imaging centers, with results returning into the patient's record rather than a fax machine. Scheduling covers online booking, recurring appointments and automatic appointment reminders, the cheapest fix for no-shows a practice has. Claim submission and the quality, clinical and practice management reports are built from the same data.

Every one of those runs on something the record already holds: a chart, an order, an appointment, a claim it sent.

The moment the answer is on somebody else's website, it stops. Practice Fusion cannot log into a payer's portal to read why a claim was denied, check a prior authorization sitting with an insurer, open an imaging center's result site where there is no interface, or look at the specialty pharmacy holding a biologic. Nor can it tell you what has not happened, which is the whole problem.

Pending results and authorizations can be listed before clinic opens

What the practice is still waiting on becomes a page instead of a worry.

Every order placed more than three weeks ago with no result attached, listed with the patient, the date and what was ordered, so the pathology nobody reported back is visible while it still matters. Pending prior authorizations checked each morning on the insurer's own site, approvals separated from the ones still sitting and ranked by how long they have waited.

Denials read out of the payer portal into a worklist naming the claim, the payer and the reason, rather than discovered one by one. In an allergy practice, patients on an immunotherapy schedule who have not been in for six weeks assembled as a list for a nurse, alongside the vials approaching expiry and the ones running low. Balances past sixty days gathered with their ages on them.

Everything in that paragraph is reading and listing. Nothing in it writes to a chart, places an order, or reaches a patient. Those are different acts, and they belong to the people licensed to make them.

The chart stays exactly where the clinician left it

A biopsy ordered in March that never came back is visible in two systems, and flagged in neither. Finding it means looking in two places and comparing them, which is not a clinical judgment.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens Practice Fusion, the payer portal, the imaging center's result site or the insurer's authorization page, reads what is there, and hands the practice a worklist.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and you can watch a run and stop it. It does not write to a chart, place an order, or send anything to a patient. Every clinical decision, and every message that reaches a patient, waits for the person qualified to make it.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names the sites it opens.