The closer
We started with a single sentence — when this happens, do that — and climbed all the way to agents that set their own steps. This last instalment is the most important, because it’s the one that decides whether all the rest helps you or quietly hollows out your work. The question isn’t what can Zapier do? By now the answer is “a startling amount.” The question is what should you let it?
Two piles
Sort the work into two piles. The first is dull, rules-based, repeated and reversible: gathering, filing, formatting, copying, reminding, first-pass sorting. This is the pile to automate without guilt. Every hour you reclaim here is an hour returned to the work that actually carries your name. The Signal pipeline lives entirely in this pile, and it should.
The second pile is judgement, taste, context and accountability: deciding what a finding really means, whether a claim is fair, how to phrase something a worried patient will read, what to leave out, when the data doesn’t support the headline everyone wants. This is the pile you do not hand over — not because the tools can’t produce something plausible, but because plausible is precisely the danger. A confident, well-formatted, subtly wrong paragraph is worse than a blank page, because it invites you to stop looking.
The test
When you’re unsure which pile a task belongs in, ask three questions. Is it reversible — if the machine gets it wrong, can you catch and undo it cheaply? Is it low-stakes — does a mistake cost minutes, or credibility? And is there a human at the gate before anything becomes fact, becomes public, or reaches a regulator? Three yeses and you can automate it. A single no and you keep your hands on it.
Why this is the whole point
This series has been practical — feeds, filters, AI steps, agents — but the thread underneath it is the reason this newsletter exists. The value of a health communications professional was never the typing, the filing or the formatting. It was the judgement: knowing what’s true, what’s allowed, what’s clear, and what’s safe to put in front of someone who will act on it. Automation is very good news for that person, because it strips away the part of the job that was never really the job.
The people who struggle in the next few years won’t be the ones who refused to automate. They’ll be the ones who automated the wrong pile — who handed over the judgement and kept the typing. Do it the other way round. Let the machine carry the queue. Keep the part only you can do.
That’s where we’ll leave it. Build the boring half. Guard the irreplaceable one.
Zapier for health communications is a practical series. This is the final part.
— Ned