Administrative burden is pulling clinicians away from patients
For many clinicians, a healthcare career has been overshadowed by paperwork and digital administrative tasks. This work can consume a significant portion of a clinician’s day, pulling their focus away from direct patient care and contributing to widespread burnout, which then negatively impacts care quality and outcomes.
Despite burnout improving in recent years, the situation is still not sustainable. The core of healthcare work should be centered on the patient and the humanistic services clinicians have committed their lives to—supporting cancer patients, delivering babies, performing life-saving emergency procedures—not endless key clicks in an EHR.
A recent American Medical Association interview with Margaret Lozovatsky, MD, the AMA’s chief medical information officer and vice president of digital health innovations, highlighted the opportunities technology and AI can have on reducing burnout and administrative work. She said, “These tools that take away some of the administrative burden will decrease the pressures on staffing and will allow us to have more time in our day to do the things that make us happy.”
Restoring the joy in practice can be a guiding light for initiatives related to clinical workforce challenges and technology decisions. Integrated technology partnerships, ambient solutions, smoother EHR workflows, and new advances in generative AI (GenAI) can help care teams focus more time on patients by augmenting clinical expertise and automating tasks.
AI is a seismic opportunity for healthcare—with responsibility
In the Wolters Kluwer 2025 Future Ready Healthcare report on the role of GenAI in healthcare, 76% of respondents cited “reducing clinician burnout” as a top priority for GenAI tools, and 80% cited optimizing workflows as an opportunity.
With thoughtful implementation of vendor tools and existing workflows, AI can help both of these goals by shaving time during patient interactions. Even reducing administrative tasks by 10 or 30 seconds or needing fewer EHR clicks can meaningfully add up. Applying GenAI to decision support guidance can help automate routine information gathering by surfacing clinical information and recommendations more quickly. Clinicians can receive care plan summaries and step-by-step guidance in plain language, with more digestible action steps and possible follow-up questions they may not have considered.
But accuracy and safety must be prioritized when it comes to these tools. This is where specialized, purpose-built AI becomes essential. To be effective and safe, GenAI in healthcare must be grounded in trusted content, produce consistent and verifiable results, and be designed to fit seamlessly within clinical workflows and EHRs. Otherwise, valuable time savings will be negated by fact-checking and other manual tasks outside the standard workflow.
Enterprise strategies are needed for GenAI to be effective
AI alone won’t help clinicians reclaim time with their patients. It must be thoughtfully and strategically considered for widespread adoption and within service to the enterprise. It must also be prioritized within wider strategies to keep patients engaged.
Organizations need to have strategies in place to support more patient-centered care. We cannot simply bolt new technology onto broken workflows and expect transformative results. Parallel operational and systemic changes should complement these tools while supporting value-based and patient-focused care.
Additional key strategies that can help reduce clinician burnout alongside technology:
- Proper financial and regulatory incentives to prioritize approaches that improve clinical care.
- Business and clinical leaders collaborating on new operating models that focus on quality of care and the patient-provider experience.
- Development of better tools to measure and report the vital signs of healthcare delivery with metrics around variability, processes and outcomes, and experiences.
Finally, enterprises need to establish organizational governance over AI tools. As vendor options expand and AI is integrated into workflows, clinicians need to understand how it’s used and what the organizational policies are. The Future Ready Healthcare survey showed that only 18% of respondents were aware of published policies for GenAI organizational use.
This governance helps keep guardrails up and provides frameworks for tool use among clinicians—unvetted GenAI tools can lead to inconsistent care, lost time due to additional fact-checking, and even safety concerns from hallucinations. Established governance can help focus attention and give clinicians clear guidance on tools.
Reclaiming time and restoring joy in practice
As AI tools continue to help optimize efforts, consider how leaders can give that time back to clinicians and their patients. These approaches can help reduce burnout and also help give clinicians more time and incentives to focus on their patients, returning to the original practice of medicine.
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