Most physician practice owners assume their IT is fine, because nothing is visibly on fire. The provider shows up, tickets get closed, the invoice gets paid. But “showing up” is not the same as the work landing, and a lot of practices are paying for a provider that has quietly stopped performing without anyone putting a name to it.
That was the thread running through a candid leadership conversation between PEAKE CEO Chris Knotts and Omega Systems CEO Mike Fuhrman in our “Less Friction, More Medicine” series: the operational drag inside most practices is rarely a dramatic failure. It is slow logins, recurring problems that never get solved, workarounds the team has accepted as normal. It accumulates, it becomes the baseline, and it costs the practice real money before anyone measures it.
Below are the questions practice leaders ask most often, answered directly.
What are the signs my IT provider is underperforming?
Your IT provider is likely underperforming if you cannot name the last few things they fixed before you noticed a problem, tickets routinely sit longer than a few hours, the same issues keep coming back, and you receive no regular reporting on performance or security. A provider doing their job is proactive, accountable, and measurable.
The clearest warning signs, drawn from what we see in first meetings with practice owners:
- You cannot name the last three things they proactively fixed before you noticed them.
- There is no named human who picks up the phone, and routine tickets stay open for days.
- The same problems recur after being “fixed,” because the root cause was never addressed.
- You get no monthly reporting on system performance, ticket volume, or security posture.
- They have never benchmarked your practice against similar-sized practices or walked you through a strategic plan.
- Your staff have built workarounds for systems that are “being weird today” and stopped reporting them.
If several of these sound familiar, the friction is already there. It simply has not been measured yet.
What is operational friction in a medical practice?
Operational friction is the accumulated drag created by the systems around clinical care when those systems underperform: slow or unreliable technology, manual workarounds, downtime, scheduling and billing delays, and staff hours spent fighting tools instead of supporting patients.
The defining trait of friction is that it is quiet. It rarely announces itself as a crisis. A practice adapts to a slow system, builds a workaround, and moves on. Each instance feels minor. Added together across a year, they represent real lost revenue, lost clinical time, and staff burnout. Most of the drag inside a practice is not coming from medicine. It is coming from the systems surrounding it, and often from the provider responsible for them.
What does it actually cost a practice when IT underperforms?
IT underperformance costs a practice in four places: lost clinical time when systems are slow or down, lost revenue from friction in scheduling and billing, wasted staff hours spent on manual work, and the high cost of turnover when friction drives people out.
The reason it goes unmeasured is that it is rarely a single line item. Lost clinical time means fewer patients seen and delayed documentation. Lost revenue compounds an industry-wide problem: reimbursement is already slow and incomplete, and friction in eligibility and billing workflows makes it worse, costing the practice money it has already earned. Staff cost is the price of paying for hours that produce no clinical or financial value. And turnover, the most expensive category, is covered below.
How much are operating costs rising for medical practices right now?
Operating costs are rising sharply: 90% of medical groups reported higher operating costs in 2025 than in 2024, with an average increase of about 11.1%, according to a June 2025 MGMA poll. Labor was the largest driver, followed by supplies and technology.
When margins tighten, the hidden cost of an underperforming provider stops being a back-office concern and becomes a financial one. Every dollar lost to inefficiency matters more in a year when the baseline cost of everything else is up double digits, which makes a provider that is not earning its fee harder to justify.
How does IT friction connect to physician burnout?
IT friction is a direct contributor to burnout: 62% of physicians named administrative burden their top burnout driver in a 2024 Medscape survey, ranking it above long hours and lack of respect, and a large share of that burden is technology that does not work the way it should.
The financial stakes are significant. Research from the American Medical Association and Stanford has estimated that replacing a single physician costs between $500,000 and $1 million depending on specialty, and that physician burnout costs the U.S. health system roughly $4.6 billion a year in turnover and reduced clinical hours. When friction pushes a physician toward the exit, the practice does not only lose a person. It loses the revenue that person generated and pays a steep cost to fill the gap.
Can I evaluate my IT provider without a disruptive overhaul?
Yes. The first step is not switching providers; it is measuring where the friction lives through a focused check of how your current provider actually performs, rather than a full assessment of everything at once.
The instinct to avoid a rip-and-replace project is the right one, and it is not necessary at the start. You identify where time and money are leaking, quantify it, and decide from there. Most practices find that naming the problem precisely is the hardest part, because the cost has been distributed across so many small moments that no one ever added it up. Once it is on the table, the decision about your provider becomes a business decision rather than a guess.
Why does a healthcare-only IT provider matter?
A healthcare-only IT provider matters because a technology failure in a practice is a patient care problem, not an inconvenience, and general IT providers do not work daily with the EHR systems and clinical-to-billing integrations a practice depends on.
PEAKE works exclusively with physician practices, and every technician has healthcare industry experience. That focus is the difference between a provider who can fix a server and a partner who understands what happens in the practice when that server is down during a full clinic day. The cost of friction is highest in exactly the moments a healthcare-only provider is built to prevent.
How do I check whether my IT provider is doing their job?
The most direct way is to run a structured check across the areas where providers quietly fall short: proactive management, visibility and reporting, support responsiveness, process documentation, and security. If you cannot answer those questions confidently, that is the answer.
PEAKE built a free friction scorecard for exactly this: 7 categories, 21 questions, about 5 minutes. The point is not the answers you have. It is the questions you cannot answer. It scores where your current setup, and your current provider, are leaving friction in place, so your next decision is grounded in your own practice rather than an industry average.
Find out where your IT provider is falling short. Take the free PEAKE friction scorecard, and if two or more categories stand out, book a 20-minute IT Diagnostic at peaketechnology.com/diagnostic or call (866) 357-3253.
This article draws on the PEAKE x Omega “Less Friction, More Medicine” leadership fireside with Chris Knotts, Founder and CEO of PEAKE Technology Partners, and Mike Fuhrman, CEO of Omega Systems. PEAKE Technology Partners is a healthcare-focused managed services provider serving multi-location physician practices across the Mid-Atlantic and North Carolina.
