$656-$1,319: AI audit for OT/SLT practices

You searched some version of "how much does an AI audit cost for an occupational therapy practice," or the speech-language version of that same question, because you are done reading vendor pages that talk around the number without ever landing on it. You do most of the admin yourself, or close to it, and you are not spending an hour of your week on a demo that ends with "let's set up a follow-up call to discuss pricing." This time you want the honest figure before you pick up the phone, not after.

The number, converted honestly

AI Health Practice's entry offer, the AI Opportunity & Growth Assessment, is priced in the UK at £495 to £995 depending on practice size. At the mid-market exchange rate of £1 = $1.3252, checked via XE.com on 24 September 2026, that converts to roughly $656 to $1,319. Exchange rates move daily, so treat this as an approximate conversion at time of publication, not a fixed quote; the exact figure for your practice, in your currency, is confirmed on the discovery call before any payment changes hands.

That range sits well below what most standalone AI consulting engagements are built to charge. General AI consultants in the US commonly bill $150 to over $1,000 an hour, with independent consultants clustering around $150 to $350 an hour and ongoing retainers running $2,000 to $10,000 a month (Stack, "AI Consultant Salary & Pricing Guide," 2026, an industry compilation rather than an association-published figure, flagged accordingly). Almost none of that market is built for a fixed-price, single engagement sized for a solo clinician or a two- or three-therapist practice. So what this means for you: if the quote you got elsewhere started with a comma after the first digit, you were talking to the wrong kind of firm for a practice your size.

What the fee actually buys

The assessment scores your practice against four dimensions of the CARE Framework™: Clinical workflow (documentation, treatment plan content, session notes), Administrative burden (scheduling, billing, referral and discharge letters), Readiness (staff, systems, data quality), and Economics (ROI model, payback period). You get a written report ranking your specific opportunities by where the return is highest, plus a 90-day roadmap for acting on them. It is not a sales pitch dressed up as an audit. If your readiness score is low or the economics do not support AI spend right now, the report says so, and names what would need to change before revisiting it.

So what this means for you: you are not paying for a vendor recommendation. You are paying for someone with no stake in which tool you eventually buy to tell you which parts of your practice would actually move the needle, and which parts would not.

How long it takes

Two weeks from the initial discovery call to delivery of the full report and presentation. Your own time commitment is roughly 2.5 to 3 hours across a short questionnaire and interviews, not a multi-week internal project. For a sole practitioner who is already the clinician, the scheduler, and the person chasing referral paperwork after hours, that time cost is kept deliberately small.

Why an audit instead of a tool

You have probably already looked at a scribe, a scheduling assistant, or a billing tool, and read a vendor's promise that it pays for itself within months. Some of those products are genuinely decent. The problem is rarely the tool itself, it is the order of operations. Buying a tool before you know which part of your practice has the biggest gap means betting that a vendor's sales pitch happens to match your practice's real bottleneck, and there is no reason it should. A solo therapist handling documentation, scheduling, billing, and referral letters personally has several candidate problems, not one, and the highest-value fix is rarely the one a single vendor is trying to sell that particular week.

So what this means for you: an audit is not a substitute for buying a tool eventually. It is the step that tells you which tool, if any, is worth buying first, and whether your practice has the staff time and systems in place to actually use it once you have paid for it.

Whether it is worth booking

Three things make this a reasonable first step rather than another sales conversation.

First, the administrative cost problem is real and measurable. The national average pay for a therapy administrative assistant in the US is $32,000 a year, or $15.38 an hour (ZipRecruiter, September 2026), and that figure covers only the hours actually staffed, not the calls missed at lunch, after 6pm, or while you are with another patient. If you do not employ anyone in that role, $32,000 is roughly the value of the hours you are personally absorbing instead.

Second, adoption in your field is already ahead of where most owners assume. A worldwide survey of 884 occupational therapy professionals across 81 countries, published in WORK: A Journal of Prevention, Assessment & Rehabilitation in August 2026, found 56.3% already using AI at work, spread across documentation, administration, education, research, intervention planning, and communication (Cason, Gafni-Lachter, Richmond and Jacobs, World Federation of Occupational Therapists survey, August 2026; a self-selected online sample, so treat the percentage as directional rather than a population figure). The finding that matters here is not the headline number. It is that adoption is already scattered across six different use cases with, in most practices, no attempt to rank which one actually pays back first. That is precisely the gap a scored audit is built to close.

Third, the competitive backdrop is consolidating, and pediatric therapy is where it shows up first. An industry tracker counted 93 private-equity-backed platforms operating across pediatric occupational and speech therapy by June 2026, up from around 90 in May, with 22 acquisition deals recorded in the first half of the year, 16 of them speech therapy targets and 11 occupational therapy (Acuity News/Mergium, "Pediatric Therapy M&A H1 2026," an industry M&A tracker rather than an association source, flagged accordingly). That figure covers the pediatric segment specifically, not every OT or SLT setting, but the direction of travel, more consolidated operators competing on standardized systems and consistent patient experience, is the same pressure independent practices across the field are starting to feel.

The call: if administrative load, staffing cost, or inconsistent documentation time already show up as a problem you can name, book the discovery call and find out where the return actually sits before spending on any specific tool. If nothing in your practice currently points to a gap, the honest move is to wait, not to buy something to fill the silence.

Ready to see where your own practice scores? Book a free 20-minute discovery call, or read the full breakdown of the AI Opportunity & Growth Assessment first.

See also: where OT and SLT billing automation actually pays back, and what an AI tool can and cannot do for your treatment plan documentation, two of the specific opportunity areas an audit typically scores.

Related: OT and SLT billing automation: where it pays back · what AI can and cannot do for treatment plan documentation · the same audit, priced for a psychology practice