The Admin Cost Is $960 Billion, How To Start Shrinking Yours ft. Justin Ith

Your admin team is about to get superpowers. 🦸

Here's a fun fact that'll make your jaw drop: in 2024, more people went to a behavioral health appointment than a primary care one. That's never happened before.

Therapists, you are in demand.

Here's a less fun fact: Americans spend something like $960 billion a year just on healthcare admin. Not clinicians. Not care. Just the paperwork behind the paperwork.

So what happens when someone builds a practice automation platform specifically to close that gap?

Listen to this episode to find out.

Justin Ith, co-founder and CEO of Aria, joins Uriah to talk AI, automation, and why "human in the loop" isn't going anywhere anytime soon — even as the tools get scary good.

Top 3 things you'll learn:

Not all AI is created equal. There's generic AI (your Claude, your ChatGPT, your Gemini) and there's purpose-built AI for practice-specific problems. Knowing which tool solves which problem is half the battle.

The "big hospital" advantage is shrinking. Deep benefits verification used to take a human several minutes of digging through portals. Aria does it in 11 seconds — the kind of automation that used to be exclusive to billion-dollar health systems, now available to a 10-clinician group practice.

AI won't replace your team — it'll supercharge them. The future isn't fewer people, it's fewer openings as your existing staff's capacity grows. You still need someone to "drive the car," as Justin puts it — these systems aren't perfect, and they're not fully autonomous.

A few quotes: