AI in Primary Care: How Physicians Reclaim Half Their Day

Administrative burden is the quiet crisis in primary care. Charting, inbox management, coding, and performance tracking eat into the hours doctors used to spend with patients, or with their own families. As Texas Medicine’s Phil West reports, a North Texas physician group just showed what happens when AI is built specifically to solve that problem, not just automate around it.

The Problem: Time That Never Comes Back

Catalyst Health Group, parent to Catalyst Physician Group, a physician-owned and physician-led primary care organization, and Catalyst Health Network, its clinically integrated network, knows this problem intimately. Like most primary care groups, its physicians were spending hours outside the exam room on work that had nothing to do with actually treating patients.

So instead of settling for the status quo, Catalyst partnered directly with a technology startup to help build, test, and refine an AI platform designed specifically for primary care.

The Results: 25-50% of a Physician’s Time, Back

The numbers speak for themselves. According to Christopher Crow, MD, CEO and co-founder of Catalyst Health Group, physicians using the platform are seeing meaningful time savings within just a few weeks:

“After a week or two, it saves 25% to 50% of a physician’s time because of how it can summarize the chart and give information about the patient.”

That time savings shows up everywhere in the care journey: before the visit, during the visit, and between visits, helping physicians stay locked in on the patient in front of them instead of splitting focus with a keyboard.

Physicians are putting that reclaimed time to work in one of two ways: taking back personal or family time, or seeing more patients each day and expanding access to care for their communities.

Built for Value-Based Care, Not Just Documentation

What sets this platform apart isn’t just chart summarization; it’s how deeply it’s woven into value-based care performance. Catalyst has roughly 25,000 patients enrolled in value-based programs, including the ACO REACH model and Medicare Advantage risk-based plans. The AI platform bakes performance metrics for both programs directly into the physician workflow, surfacing the benchmarks that matter for each patient right when they’re needed, not buried in a report weeks later.

As Dr. Crow put it, the benchmarks are “better presented to the physician right off the bat,” turning a compliance exercise into a visible, actionable part of daily care.

The Bigger Lesson: Technology Has to Work For You

Dr. Crow’s advice to other physician groups considering AI is direct: make sure your EHR is current enough to actually integrate with modern tools. Many practices are still running systems that are five, ten, even twenty years old, and that’s a real barrier to adoption.

His conclusion is one every practice leader should sit with:

“Status quo is the most expensive place to be. You have got to have technology that works for you.”

Why This Matters Beyond Catalyst

Catalyst’s experience is an early but telling proof point for a broader shift happening in primary care: AI that’s purpose-built for the clinical and operational realities of the specialty, not a generic assistant bolted onto an EHR, can measurably reduce burnout, expand access, and align care with the metrics that increasingly determine reimbursement.

That platform is Matic. If Catalyst’s results are any indication, the practices that adapt now, with the right technology and the right EHR foundation, will be the ones best positioned for where primary care and value-based care are heading next.

Read the full story from Texas Medicine, written by Associate Editor Phil West, to see how Catalyst Health Group and Dr. Crow are putting this into practice: Read the article on TexMed.org

Want to learn more about the Catalyst + Matic partnership? Visit Matic for Primary Care