Exhausted at the Entrance: 5 Ways to Stop Front Desk Burnout (and How AI Can Help)

It’s 2 PM on a Tuesday. The phone has rung 47 times in the last hour. Five patients are waiting in the corridor. The printer is jammed. And your best receptionist just texted that she’s “thinking about other opportunities.”

When most people hear about burnout in healthcare, they typically think of doctors and nurses—the frontline workers who are directly involved in patient care. And this concern is absolutely valid; the pressures they face are immense.

However, there’s a critical group often overlooked in the conversation: front desk workers. These individuals, who are often the first point of contact for patients, bear a significant amount of stress as well.

In fact, a recent survey by MGMA found that 64% of medical groups report that staff turnover was the same or higher in 2025 compared to 2024—and they pointed to medical assistants and front office staff as the positions experiencing the highest churn.

To better understand this trend, we’ve drawn expert insights from the Scaling Practice Management podcast.

In this article, we’ll look at 5 of the reasons for burnout and turnover in front desk healthcare staff, and provide solutions to address them.

1. Overwhelming Workloads

Front desk workers frequently deal with an overwhelming amount of responsibilities, from managing patient records and answering phone calls to scheduling appointments and dealing with insurance claims. As patient demand rises, so does the workload, leading to fatigue, frustration, and eventually burnout.

Additionally, when the front desk is tied to the phone, critical administrative documentation and back-office tasks often fall by the wayside, creating a backlog that haunts the staff.

Expert Insight: Tiffany Burke, an independent consultant with 22 years of experience in healthcare IT and practice management

One of our podcast guests, Tiffany Burke, highlights how automation allows for the “reutilization” of staff to clear these backlogs:

The Solution: Automate Away the Interruptions

By automating phone calls, practices provide immediate relief to their team by removing the constant, jarring interruptions of a ringing line. This allows leadership to pivot talent toward high-value documentation and patient-follow-up tasks that have been “stacking up for months.”

Introducing AI agents that are natively integrated with your EHR (e.g with athenaOne or ModMed EMA) brings an additional benefit: if the AI handles data entry and schedules appointments directly in the system, it eliminates the repetitive manual labor that fuels burnout. When the backlog is cleared and the mechanical work is automated, staff can finally focus on the one or two core tasks that actually require human judgment, leaving them feeling accomplished rather than perpetually behind.

2. Patients Frustrated by Long Wait Times

Managing frustrated patients who’ve been waiting too long is one of the hardest parts of front desk work. Whether patients are waiting on the phone or in the lobby, their frustration adds to the stress for front desk staff who are already juggling multiple tasks and constantly playing catch-up. Even your best medical receptionists can become flustered when annoyed patients blame them for something beyond their control.

Expert Insight: Angela Presley, Program Manager for Healthcare Accelerators at Dartmouth

We talked with Angela Presley in one of our first episodes of Scaling Practice Management. During our conversation, she highlighted why patient experience is so critical to staff wellbeing:

But how can staff “be at their best” when they’re already facing more work than they can handle?

The Solution: Defuse Frustration Before It Reaches Your Staff

What if patients could get their cases addressed without waiting, so they’re less frustrated by the time they interact with human staff?

AI-powered assistants like Talkie.ai can immediately address patient needs, from appointment scheduling and confirmation to processing prescription refill requests and answering frequently asked questions.

By removing the ringing phone from the equation, your staff can focus on complex cases that truly need human empathy, rather than burning out on repetitive inquiries while an increasingly impatient queue builds up.

3. Communication Breakdowns Across Teams

Communication breakdowns between departments—whether it’s between the front office, clinical teams, or administrative staff—lead to “investigative” work that eats up hours of the day. Without a shared “point of connection,” departments often operate in silos, unaware of how their small errors create massive downstream failures.

Expert Insight: Christina King, Vice President of Revenue Cycle Operations at Nevada Heart and Vascular Center

In her podcast episode, Christina King emphasized that cross-functional communication is the only way to stop recurring errors:

The Solution: Create Points of Connection

Solving communication breakdowns requires commitment from leadership. First, prioritize regular cross-functional meetings where teams can review “points of failure” without blame. Make these meetings structured: identify the pattern (claims denying for “member not found”), trace it back to the source (front desk data entry), and implement a fix.

Second, reduce human error at the data entry stage. AI agents can capture patient data with high precision, automatically updating the EHR with accurate insurance information, patient contact details, and appointment notes. For example, when an AI agent schedules an appointment, it can verify insurance eligibility in real-time and flag any coverage issues. This means your cross-functional meetings can focus on strategy and improvement rather than constantly troubleshooting preventable mistakes.

4. Difficulty Retaining Talented Staff

High turnover is often the result of staff feeling that their professional life has become a series of automated tasks, leading them to “clock out” mentally long before they leave the job.

Expert Insight: Nacole Hodge, independent Epic consultant and career coach

Another of our guests, Nacole Hodge, works with healthcare professionals struggling with burnout. In her episode, she describes a deeper crisis: the person behind the professional feels disconnected and loses their identity. The daily grind of policies, procedures, and numbers buries the passion that brought them to healthcare in the first place:

She explains how this disconnect manifests as a survival mechanism—staff build emotional walls to cope with the relentless workload:

This dynamic affects both clinical professionals and front desk staff. While nurses and doctors may build walls patient-by-patient, front desk workers build them call-by-call, complaint-by-complaint.

When staff enter the day already defeated by an overwhelming schedule, and when they’ve built walls to protect themselves from the burden, their empathy—and their reason for being in healthcare—disappears. This is the silent killer of retention.

The Solution: Help Your Staff Reconnect with Their “Why”

Create space for your staff to reconnect with the purpose that brought them to healthcare. This means:

• Reduce the mechanical burden: Use technology to automate the “policies, procedures, and numbers” that drain passion—the repetitive data entry, the endless phone calls, the scheduling chaos. When the administrative weight is lifted, staff can focus on patient care instead of paperwork.
• Facilitate personal connection: Follow Nacole’s advice about getting to know your team on a personal level. Schedule regular team lunches or gatherings where work is set aside. When you spend 40+ hours a week with these people, you need to know who they are beyond their job titles.
• Encourage reflection: Ask your staff why they entered healthcare. Create opportunities for them to share their stories and remind each other of the impact they make. When people can articulate their “why,” they’re less likely to burn out.

When people can take each patient “one at a time” with genuine presence instead of starting the day already overwhelmed, and they feel supported by the team they know well, they are far more likely to stay.

5. When Good Staff Compensate for Problem Employees

Finally, scaling a practice requires the courage to protect your environment from what we might call “culture blight.” When 20% of your team is disengaged or problematic, the other 80% picks up the slack—and they burn out faster.

Good employees don’t just do their own jobs when toxic colleagues underperform; they absorb the extra phone calls, smooth over the mistakes, and apologize to frustrated patients on behalf of team members who don’t care. This “invisible overtime” is a silent killer of morale and a fast track to losing your best people.

Expert Insight:

Tiffany Burke also argues that leaders must be willing to make hard decisions to protect the 80% of their team who are truly invested:

The Solution: Protect Your Culture

Practice managers must shift to a “protecting culture” mindset. The fear of letting go of underperformers often comes down to one question: “Who will answer the phones?”

Use technology to remove this barrier. When AI handles the baseline workload—answering calls, scheduling appointments, processing routine requests—you can afford to make personnel decisions based on culture fit. You’ll never feel forced to keep a toxic employee just to keep the lights on.

But technology alone won’t fix a culture problem. You also need to:

• Act decisively: Once you’ve identified that someone is a “blight on the culture,” move quickly to address it through coaching or, if necessary, terminating their employment.
• Communicate your values: Make it clear to your team that you’re protecting the environment for the 80% who show up with dedication and care.
• Show your top performers they’re valued: When they see you taking action to protect the culture they’ve helped build, they’ll reward you with loyalty and long-term cooperation.

The Bottom Line

Front desk burnout isn’t inevitable. It’s the result of specific, identifiable problems—and each one has a solution.

Some of these solutions involve AI technology that can lift the administrative burden and eliminate the mechanical work that buries your staff. Others require leadership commitment to create connection, protect culture, and help your team reconnect with their purpose.

The practices that will thrive in the next decade are those that use innovation not to replace their people, but to protect them.

What You Can Do Today

Start by identifying which of these five drivers is hitting your practice hardest. Is it the phone ringing off the hook? The communication gaps? The talent walking out the door? Then explore AI solutions that target that specific pain point.

The goal isn’t to automate everything—it’s to remove the obstacles that prevent your people from doing what they do best: caring for patients.