Can AI bring the humanity back to healthcare?

Every doctor has a story about a small moment that changed the way they see patient care.

For me, it started with a stool.

During my two decades of practicing emergency medicine, I noticed that if I stood while talking to patients, they often looked uneasy and seemed less willing to share details key to their diagnosis — like they thought I was already halfway out the door. But when I pulled up a chair and sat beside them, the whole tone shifted. They relaxed. They opened up.

It didn’t matter that I might have spent the exact same amount of time in the room — what mattered was how present I seemed. That small act of sitting built trust.

And in healthcare, trust is everything.

Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about that simple truth, especially as technology has reshaped our industry. Because ironically, the very tools we once worried would make medicine less human — computers, algorithms, even AI — might now be the key to unlocking more human-centered care.

If we use them right, these technologies can give clinicians the one thing they’ve lost the most — time. Time to listen. Time to connect. Time to do what we all got into medicine to do: take care of patients.

The evolution: From paper charts to pajama time

When I began my career, everything was handwritten. I had my trusty note cards, a pen and the patient in front of me. The focus was on conversation, not clicks.

Then came the computer on wheels — and suddenly, medicine got noisier. More screens. More boxes to check. More time spent documenting than actually caring for people. Patient satisfaction scores dropped, and I understood why: We weren’t looking at patients anymore. We were looking at screens.

And then “pajama time” entered the lexicon — a term that represented the hours clinicians spent at night finishing documentation. For many, it was three or four hours tacked on to every day. And with every extra hour behind a keyboard, we drifted further from the reason most of us became doctors in the first place.

Technology that frees not frustrates

Fast forward to today and technology is finally starting to correct its own course. Tools like ambient listening, which automatically capture and structure physician/patient conversations, are restoring hours of clinicians’ time each day.

A friend of mine recently told me her pajama time has been cut by two-thirds. That’s not just a productivity metric — that’s an extra dinner with her family or an extra hour of rest before the next shift. For patients, it means a doctor who makes eye contact again. Who listens without typing. Who’s present.

Technology, when designed thoughtfully, doesn’t distance us from patients. It frees us to focus on them.

Where leaders should invest

When healthcare leaders ask me where to invest in AI, my answer is simple: Start with administrative burden. We waste enormous energy on tasks like claims processing, prior authorizations and sorting electronic messages. These are areas where AI and automation can make an immediate, measurable impact.

But we also need smarter clinical decision support — technology that doesn’t just throw alerts at you but helps synthesize the right information at the right moment. I don’t need a pop-up every time I prescribe ibuprofen; I need a system that recognizes patient-specific risks and provides insights that matter.

That’s where the true value lies: Tech that thinks with us, not for us.

From data overload to data insight

We’re living through a transition from a drought of data to an explosion of it. Every hospital and every system now sits atop mountains of information — yet too often, we’re drowning in dashboards instead of discovering insights.

Technology — AI, machine learning and advanced analytics — can help us find meaning in that noise. It can connect disparate datasets to tell the story of a patient’s journey across settings, or a system’s performance across hospitals. The goal isn’t more data — it’s better care informed by smarter data.

That shift is already happening. At Vizient, I’ve seen clients use our analytics as a true north, improving patient outcomes while managing cost and complexity. Seeing care improve at a national scale — knowing our work helps clinicians be more present, more effective — that’s what keeps me inspired.

The human in the loop

Here’s the thing I always emphasize: Technology will never replace the clinician. It can’t replicate the intuition that comes from experience at the bedside, or the empathy that comes from walking into a room where a family is in crisis.

But looking ahead, I’m excited by how technology is helping us measure what really matters. We’ve long assessed care through complications, readmissions and length of stay. Those are important — but they’re not the whole story.

Imagine a future where quality also includes personalized outcomes. If I’m a 50-year-old runner going in for a knee replacement, success might mean returning to the track. For an 80-year-old, it might mean walking pain-free with their grandchild. AI can help us collect and interpret patient-reported outcomes at scale — giving us a truer picture of what “good care” means to each person.

That’s the evolution I want to see: Medicine guided by data but grounded in humanity.

After all, AI won’t heal patients. People will. But AI can give those people — the clinicians, the caregivers, the nurses and the doctors — the freedom to do what they do best.

To listen. To connect. To sit down, look a patient in the eye and say, “I’m here.”

If technology can give us back those moments, then it’s doing exactly what it should.

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