Picture this. The patient in front of me had just endured a long and complicated hospitalization for congestive heart failure. But she didn’t understand what had happened to her or why she was taking so many new medications. As an electrophysiologist specializing in heart rhythm disorders, I was equipped to handle arrhythmias, but not the complex world of heart failure management that a general cardiologist would navigate with ease. To make matters worse, her medical records were nowhere to be found, and my afternoon clinic was already running an hour behind schedule.
This frustrating scenario had become far too common. Although I specialize in treating arrhythmias, my clinic slots were regularly taken by patients with primary issues outside of my expertise. To make matters worse, very few patients came with the medical records I needed to provide high-quality clinical consultations. Our entire team was doing their best, but our back office staff was overwhelmed, and we had far too few general cardiologists to handle the volume of patients needing their expertise.
We mitigated many of these challenges in the pre-AI era by hiring additional clinicians and staff. But this approach had significant drawbacks. It added considerable overhead costs to the clinic and required PAs to do pure administrative work. While it was critical to expand our general cardiology and electrophysiology care capacity by hiring more clinicians, we have not been able to unburden their load of administrative tasks or to increase the efficiency of their clinic visits.
These issues are emblematic of the challenges in US healthcare. Administrative activities account for one-third of total healthcare costs and are a major contributor to clinician burnout. The large majority of administrative tasks come from areas like chart review, health insurance utilization management activities and clerical tasks. I complete these tasks because my patients depend on them and no one else will, but each form I fill out reminds me that I didn’t spend sixteen years in training after high school to manage paperwork.
Physician burnout isn’t just a reflection of overworked doctors who need a little more vacation time. This kind of burnout directly harms patients. Physicians with burnout have more than twice the odds of self-reported medical errors, and burnout is associated with 2-fold increased odds for unsafe care, unprofessional behaviors, and low patient satisfaction. Additionally, burned-out physicians spend less time with patients and are more likely to leave practice, reducing access to care. Unless we create a more productive and sustainable work environment for physicians and other clinicians, the years dedicated to medical training is wasted, to the detriment of patients and their access to care.
There has been great optimism about the role of AI in transforming healthcare for the benefit of patients, clinicians and society. The first manifestation has been an explosion of AI scribe products. However, despite their impressive funding rounds and growing adoption, fundamentally, they only address in-visit note taking which in reality is a fraction of the healthcare workflow challenge.
AI scribe products excel at capturing encounter narratives and converting spoken words into structured notes, but they operate in isolation from the broader clinical context and information ecosystem.
The reality is that documentation represents just one piece of a much larger administrative puzzle that keeps clinicians from spending meaningful time with patients.
What clinicians really need today is comprehensive support to offload routine tasks.
They need intelligent systems that can proactively highlight relevant patient history before appointments, flag care gaps, and automatically queue up appropriate screening reminders or preventive care protocols.
They need tools that can handle the administrative orchestration of referrals, prior authorizations, and insurance verifications without constant manual intervention.
And they need technology that can manage the asynchronous communication burden – triaging patient messages, coordinating with care teams, and ensuring critical results don’t fall through the cracks.
The goal is not just to offload documentation burden; it is to liberate clinicians to focus on clinical decision-making, patient relationships, and complex problem solving, leaving AI technology to handle the routine, repetitive tasks that currently fragment their attention and extend their workdays well beyond clinic hours.
The solution of hiring more staff is not a sustainable one for clinics and health systems across the US facing cuts to federal funding, challenges in hiring, and questions about being able to keep their doors open at all. These systematic challenges and dysfunction become even more urgent when viewed against the backdrop of America’s rapidly aging population and escalating healthcare demands. By 2030, 1 in 6 people in the world will be aged 60 years or over, with many requiring more care than at any other point in their lives. This collision course between burnout and demand is unsustainable. Something has to give, and it’s usually the quality of care or the careers of our physicians. Without fundamental change, we’re building a healthcare system that works for no one. Not the overwhelmed physicians, not the underserved patients, and certainly not the families counting on both.
AI has enormous potential to improve parts of our jobs, but we should not settle for that. American healthcare needs transformative AI technology to improve efficiency, access and patient experience, and allow clinicians to do the type of work they have trained to do.
Our path forward lies in leveraging AI and emerging technologies to build the healthcare system we desperately need: one that can serve every patient better, without burning out every doctor. For the first time, we have the opportunity to dramatically expand access to care while improving evidence-based prevention and treatment for individual patients and improving the utilization of clinicians’ expertise.
Photo: lerbank, Getty Images
Dr. Eric Stecker is the co-founder and Chief Medical Officer at Insight Health, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at Oregon Health and Science University. He also chairs the American College of Cardiology’s Science and Quality Committee, which is responsible for national cardiology practice guidelines and other clinical policy documents. He maintains a practice that focuses on advanced ablation and device implantation. He received a B.S. and M.D. in the Medical Scholars Program from the University of Wisconsin Madison. He received an M.P.H. with a focus on health management and policy from the University of Michigan.
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