The story comes from a post by /u/connerj70 on r/automation, posted 23 September 2026.
The poster describes building an automation for a general practice medical clinic to handle its outbound specialist referrals, and walks through how the work was done before and after.
A clinic's referral queue looks simple from the outside. A doctor decides a patient needs a specialist, and someone turns that decision into paperwork, a fax, a phone call. According to the poster, before any of it was automated, that "someone" was a single employee doing all of it by hand, one referral at a time.
The job before automation
The poster lays out the full sequence the employee ran for every referral that landed in the clinic's "post visit" queue. Download the referral letter. Download the patient's recent doctor's note. Download whatever tests or scans applied. Look up the specialist's contact details. Assemble a fax packet and send it. Text or call the patient to let them know. Then follow up later to confirm the patient actually saw the specialist. Multiply that by every referral the clinic generates, and it is a full time job on its own.
Why he did the job by hand first
What stands out is not the automation itself, it is what happened before any of it got built. The poster says he sat down with the employees who handled referrals and mapped out their workflow, a process that took around four hours spread over two days. During that time he shadowed them, asked questions, and did the process manually himself.
Only after that did he start building. He is direct about why the pace stayed slow: healthcare work means being careful with patient data, getting access to several different internal systems, and generally not breaking anything that matters. The initial version took a few weeks to build, and once it was working he supervised it while it ran, checking that it was handling referrals correctly before he trusted it with more. Only then did he start increasing how much of the queue it was allowed to handle.
What you can do tomorrow morning
Two things from this are worth taking straight into your own week, whether the process you are looking at involves patient data or not.
First, do the job by hand before you automate it, even a small slice of it. A flowchart drawn from a meeting will miss the exceptions the process actually runs into, the referral letter that is missing a page, the specialist whose fax number changed. Sitting with the person who does the work, or doing it yourself for a day, surfaces the judgment calls nobody wrote down.
Second, when the process touches something you cannot afford to get wrong, do not switch the automation on and walk away. Watch it operate on real cases before you let it run unsupervised, and only widen how much it handles once you have seen it get the harder cases right, not just the easy ones. The clinic referral automation earned more volume gradually, in that order, and that order is the part worth copying.