Most healthcare practices freeze when AI suddenly gives them back 1-3 hours per clinician daily.
You’d think saving that much time would be an immediate win. But I’ve watched healthcare leaders face that question “Okay, now what?” and completely lock up.
What really caught me off guard was how many practices initially didn’t know what to do with their reclaimed time. The assumption was always that clinicians would automatically see more patients or catch up on backlogged work.
What actually happened was more complex.
Some physicians used that time to have real conversations with patients again. The kind of meaningful interactions that drew them to medicine in the first place. Others finally had breathing room to think strategically about their practice instead of just surviving each day.
But here’s what nobody talks about: some practices actually struggled with the guilt of having “free” time.
After years of being overwhelmed, clinicians didn’t know how to operate without that constant pressure. I saw physicians who would artificially fill that reclaimed time with busy work because they felt uncomfortable not being maxed out.
The Productivity Trap
This reveals something fundamental about healthcare’s broken relationship with productivity.
Most healthcare leaders equate being busy with being valuable. There’s this deeply ingrained belief that if you’re not overwhelmed, you’re not working hard enough or contributing enough.
Healthcare has conflated activity with impact for so long that leaders genuinely didn’t know how to measure value outside of “hours worked” or “patients seen per hour.”
I remember one practice administrator telling me, “If my doctors aren’t stressed and running behind, how do I know they’re being productive?”
That statement encapsulated everything wrong with how we think about efficiency in healthcare. We’ve normalized dysfunction to the point where chaos feels like competence.
The practices that broke through this mindset were the ones that shifted from measuring inputs to measuring outcomes. Patient satisfaction, clinical quality, staff retention, even physician well-being.
But that requires a fundamental reimagining of what productivity means in healthcare.
The Strategic Time Allocation
The practices that succeeded were the ones that made strategic decisions upfront about how to deploy those reclaimed hours.
I had to completely reframe how leaders thought about “unproductive” time. Instead of calling it “recovery time,” I started calling it “sustainability reserves” or “quality assurance time.”
Because that’s what it really is. It’s the buffer that prevents the system from breaking down.
One cardiology group was skeptical until I showed them the math. Their physician turnover was costing them $800,000 per departure according to physician burnout research. When we protected that 25% buffer time, their physician satisfaction scores jumped, sick days dropped by 40%, and they didn’t lose a single doctor that year.
That “wasted” time saved them potentially millions in turnover costs.
But the real business case goes deeper. When physicians aren’t constantly in survival mode, their clinical decision-making improves. They catch things they might have missed when rushed. Patient satisfaction scores go up because interactions feel more human.
The practices that get this understand that sustainability isn’t a luxury. It’s a competitive advantage.
The Breakthrough Moment
The lightbulb moment usually happens when leaders see their competition struggling with something they’ve completely avoided.
I had one hospital CEO who was absolutely resistant to the idea. Kept saying “we can’t afford to have doctors sitting around.”
Then his biggest competitor had three physicians quit in one month. Massive patient disruption, emergency locum costs, the whole nightmare scenario. Meanwhile, his practice was stable, his doctors were happy, and he was actually poaching talent from competitors.
That’s when he called me and said, “I think I finally understand what you meant about prevention being cheaper than crisis management.”
The real breakthrough comes when they realize that the “sustainability reserves” aren’t just about preventing burnout. They’re about creating the mental space for strategic thinking.
When you’re not constantly putting out fires, you can actually see opportunities. You can plan. You can innovate.
It’s the difference between running a practice and building a practice.
First-Time Resolution
When healthcare leaders finally get that mental space for strategic thinking, the first thing they almost always tackle is patient experience.
But not in the way you’d expect.
When leaders are in crisis mode, they think patient experience means shorter wait times or faster throughput. But when they finally have space to think strategically, they realize it’s about completely reimagining the patient journey.
I had one family practice owner who, after getting that mental clarity, said “I’ve been optimizing for efficiency when I should have been optimizing for outcomes.”
What she discovered was that rushing through appointments to see more patients was actually creating more work downstream. Patients didn’t understand their care plans, so they’d call with questions. Simple problems became complex because there wasn’t time for proper explanation upfront.
So she redesigned everything around what she called “first-time resolution.” Spending the right amount of time with each patient so they left truly understanding their care.
Counterintuitively, this actually improved efficiency because it eliminated all those downstream calls and confusion.
The Two-Tier Split
We’re looking at a fundamental market split that’s already starting to happen.
The practices that embrace this strategic thinking space are becoming magnets for both talent and patients, while the ones stuck in the old efficiency-at-all-costs model are slowly suffocating.
Practices that made this transition become the “destination employers” in their markets. Top physicians are leaving established systems to join smaller practices that have figured out sustainability.
Patients are switching because they can feel the difference. When your doctor isn’t rushed and stressed, the entire experience changes.
But the practices that don’t adapt? They’re trapped in this vicious cycle. They can’t attract good physicians because everyone knows they’re burnout factories. Patient satisfaction drops, which hurts referrals and reputation. Revenue suffers, so they double down on the efficiency squeeze, making everything worse.
What’s really telling is that the “losing” practices often have better technology and more resources than the winners. But they’re using AI just to do the same broken things faster instead of reimagining how care should work.
I think we’re heading toward a two-tier healthcare system. Not based on money, but based on philosophy.
Early Warning Signs
The warning signs are subtle but unmistakable once you know what to look for.
The first red flag is when leadership starts celebrating metrics that don’t actually matter. Like “we saw 15% more patients this month” without asking whether those patients got better care or whether the staff is burning out.
I watch for what I call “efficiency theater.” Practices that implement AI or new technology but use it to pack more appointments into the same time slots instead of improving the quality of existing appointments.
Another early indicator is the language leaders use in meetings. If they’re constantly talking about “maximizing utilization” and “increasing throughput” but never mention physician satisfaction or patient outcomes, they’re already sliding.
But the most telling sign is how they handle unexpected events. When a practice is headed for tier two, any disruption creates chaos throughout the entire day. They have no resilience built into their system.
The tier one practices? They absorb those disruptions without breaking because they’ve built in those sustainability reserves.
The Tuesday Test
For healthcare leaders reading this and suddenly recognizing they might be in tier two, here’s the first concrete step you can take tomorrow.
Stop measuring busy-ness and start measuring outcomes. Tomorrow, literally tomorrow, change what you track in your daily huddles and weekly reports.
Instead of asking “How many patients did we see?” start asking “How many patients left truly understanding their care plan?”
I tell leaders to implement what I call the “Tuesday Test.” Every Tuesday, ask three people – a physician, a nurse, and a front desk person – this simple question: “What would you do differently today if you had 30 more minutes?”
Their answers will tell you everything about whether you’re optimizing for the right things.
If they say “see more patients,” you’re in tier two. If they say “spend more time explaining treatment plans” or “follow up on yesterday’s complex cases” or “actually eat lunch,” you’re moving toward tier one.
The second immediate step is to identify your sustainability reserves. Look at your schedule and find 15-20% buffer time that’s currently being filled with “just one more patient.” Protect that time like it’s sacred.
Because it is.
The Human Cost
What keeps me up at night is watching incredibly talented, passionate healthcare professionals slowly lose their sense of purpose because they’re trapped in systems that treat them like production units instead of healers.
I’ve seen too many physicians who went into medicine to help people, only to find themselves in practices where they’re penalized for spending an extra five minutes with a scared patient.
The really heartbreaking part is the ripple effect. When good clinicians burn out and leave, it doesn’t just hurt them. It hurts every patient they would have cared for over the next 20 years of their career.
We’re literally driving healing-focused people out of healthcare at a time when we need them most.
And here’s what really gets to me: we have the technology right now to fix this. AI can save up to two hours per provider per day and give us back the time and mental space to practice medicine with compassion and thoroughness.
But instead of using it to restore the human connection in healthcare, too many leaders are using it to squeeze even more productivity out of already exhausted teams.
I worry that we’re creating a generation of healthcare workers who are so traumatized by the current system that even when we offer them better alternatives, they can’t trust that it’s real.
The saddest part? The patients can feel it. Research shows that 47% of patients noticed their doctor spent less time looking at computers when AI scribes were used. They know when their doctor isn’t rushed and stressed.
We’re not just failing our healthcare workers. We’re failing the people they’re trying to help.
The practices that make this transition successfully treat it like a long-term investment in their competitive advantage, not a short-term expense.
The question isn’t whether AI will give healthcare back time. It already is.
The question is whether we’ll be smart enough to use that time to heal healthcare itself.
