From Burnout to Balance: How Beyond the Storm Behavioral Health Cut Admin Time in Half with Spruce

Incoming calls and texts for Beyond the Storm are now routed through intelligent call flows that give new and existing patients self-serve options — rescheduling appointments, completing intake forms, or flagging urgent needs — without ever waiting on hold during busy times. With the majority of patients now favoring text-based communication, the practice has successfully moved away from its dependence on phone-intensive workflows. This transition has streamlined administrative operations, allowing each team member to reclaim about two weeks a year.

Partnering with Spruce to build automation into the admin team's workflows — auto-replies to new appointment requests with self-service intake forms, auto-routing billing-related inquiries to the right team, and auto-assigning requests to the right clinician — has cut down the time admins spend on these repeated manual communication tasks by about half. Murdock said these hours can be focused on outreach and follow-up activities that drive new patient revenue.

When one admin team member moved on to a new opportunity, Murdock found the automated workflows had built enough capacity that her remaining team could maintain the same high level of patient responsiveness without missing a beat.

Spruce's AI-generated voicemail transcription helped eliminate the most time-consuming part of message management. Staff can now skim transcripts of minutes-long voicemail messages in seconds, copy relevant details directly into patient notes, and route information to the right clinician or respond instantly — all without listening to the full audio clip of voicemails, which could often be up to five minutes each. Murdock said between four previous administrative staff, they've collectively saved more than 40 hours per week by removing all the follow-up tasks for messages, while still sharing accurate information for clinicians to respond to patients.

A key win for the practice has been the automatic late-cancellation reminders that the Spruce team built for the practice. When a patient tries to cancel within 24 hours of an appointment, the practice sends an AI-enabled message reminding them of the cancellation fee policy and allowing patients to self-schedule a virtual appointment. When patients receive a message with the option to pay a cancellation fee or adjust to a virtual appointment, Murdock said most choose the latter and are happy to have the alternative.

Murdock estimates these automated responses course-correct roughly 75% of potential cancellations — without any staff involvement. An added benefit has been reducing pressure on the staff to communicate the practice's policy to enforce financial penalties for no-shows.

With 22 team members across two locations and remote staff in three states, Spruce serves as Beyond the Storm's central communication hub. Clinicians and admin use audio messages, scheduled messages, and cross-team tagging to collaborate on patient care in real time and after hours. Paging workflow automations ensure nothing falls through the cracks, and practice managers can verify that time-sensitive messages have been resolved without manually reviewing every thread. Murdock said the foundational team collaboration tools in Spruce, paired with the automations, have allowed her to oversee communication rather than having to facilitate it herself.