Many of the ways artificial intelligence is being deployed in the healthcare space are truly amazing. Platforms that use AI for imaging analysis, for example, have improved diagnostic accuracy and accelerated treatment timetables. And AI's capacity for analyzing vast data pools is revolutionizing drug discovery and development.

But for AI to deliver the type of changes that can cure the mounting US healthcare crisis and improve patient outcomes, more is needed. It must be applied in ways that help healthcare professionals free up more time for patient care.

“Every clinician will tell you it's not the care that's exhausting, but everything wrapped around it,” says Chris Hutchins, Founder and CEO of Hutchins Data Strategy Consulting. “The inboxes, dashboard clicks, and messages that stack up faster than doctors can respond — those are the things fueling the rampant burnout in today's healthcare industry.”

Hutchins is a nationally recognized leader in AI strategy and healthcare analytics who has spent more than three decades helping hospitals and healthcare organizations leverage data and technology to improve patient care. He has held leadership roles at the nation’s most prestigious health systems, guiding large-scale analytics initiatives, data governance programs, and the development of strategies for the adoption and integration of AI tools. As the Founder and CEO of Hutchins Data Strategy Consultants, he partners with healthcare organizations to unlock the full value of their data through ethical, scalable strategies.

“The burnout healthcare professionals are facing is not a matter of weak resilience,” Hutchins says. “It's about time theft. The AI-driven systems we're building won't deliver true value if they aren't focused on giving back the day. Providing care will never get easier if attention remains the scarcest resource in healthcare.”

How AI can rescue healthcare clinicians from burnout

The machine learning that drives AI creation and the AI algorithms that result are often focused on improving the efficiency of workflows. But AI technologies focused on efficiency alone have the potential to make matters worse for already overburdened doctors.

“To return time needed for patient care and not take it away, AI must be designed with empathy and guardrails,” Hutchins explains. “AI systems need to release doctors from digital drag, not bury them beneath administrative work that now comes at a faster pace due to AI-driven automation.”

Hutchins provides a number of examples of AI innovations healthcare providers could put in place to help reshape workflows and reclaim time for doctors, including:

• Ambient (News - Alert) transcription that turns conversation into documentation in real time.
• Smart summarization of long patient medical histories.
• Automated inbox triage and routing that alerts doctors to urgent needs.
• Workflow-aware decision support that surfaces insights at the right moment.

“These types of initiatives free up minutes, sometimes hours,” Hutchins says. “Across thousands of encounters, the time reclaimed becomes capacity and margin restored.”

Seeing chatbots as co-laborers and not competition

Greater productivity has been presented as one of the key benefits of AI. But when productivity is made the highest priority, it results in a fear that advanced algorithms could replace doctors and other healthcare workers.

Hutchins warns that using AI to simply help clinicians do more work faster misses the point. The goal should be creating a care environment that better serves both the doctor and the patient.

“AI should reduce friction, not raise expectations,” Hutchins says. “Overall operational efficiency will be a side effect of AI systems that reduce decision fatigue, restore focus to the patient encounter, and fit inside existing workflows.”

Hutchins is not the only expert envisioning a future in which doctors and AI complement each other on a shared quest to build trust while providing accurate and timely patient care. Eric Topol, MD, in his book “Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again,” says the “greatest opportunity offered by AI is not reducing errors or workloads, or even curing cancer: it is the opportunity to restore the precious and time-honored connection and trust — the human touch — between patients and doctors.”

Empowering physicians to shape and use AI in healthcare

The American Medical Association reports that AI adoption is on the rise, with 66 percent of physicians saying they used health care AI in 2024 — up from 38 percent in 2023. As doctors become more familiar with AI, they also gain the front-line knowledge needed to contribute to better AI design.

“The best AI will flow from development processes that validate experiences rather than simply validating models,” Hutchins says. “Behind every trustworthy AI solution, whether the focus is administrative tasks or clinical decision-making, is a governance framework that includes clinical voice from the start.”

Hutchins believes that embracing design disciplines that include clinical voices will not only lead to better AI tools but also encourage broader AI adoption. Rather than asking clinicians to adapt to new technologies, he feels better results can be achieved if technology is built to adapt to the clinicians who will be using it.

“When clinicians help shape design, they trust the results,” Hutchins argues. “When they trust the results, adoption follows naturally.”

AI is transforming healthcare, driving technological advancements that allow treatment to be more personalized, precise, and effective than ever before. But if the end result is to optimize patients’ health, AI must also serve those who deliver care by helping them reclaim time out of their day.