The United States could save $67 billion each year in health care costs if every person used a primary care provider as their main source of care, according to one estimate. Yet 30% of Americans don’t have a primary care doctor due to a shortage of providers, National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC). The Association of American Medical Colleges projects we’ll be short as many as 124,000 physicians by 2034, more than a third of them primary care providers. According to a recent survey from Athenahealth, 80% of physicians already report talent shortages within their practices.
Doctors keep shouldering ever-larger workloads, creating a vicious cycle that spurs them to leave the profession in droves. In turn, patients are increasingly unable to form the close relationships with providers that we know are valuable for their health. Thankfully, new technology based on artificial intelligence (AI) has enormous potential to reduce physician burnout. Giving doctors more time and energy to provide care will strengthen their relationships with patients–and improve our nation’s health.
I know firsthand from my time practicing medicine that doctors are suffering from exhaustion and burnout. The constant fear that crucial details about a patient’s care may have slipped through the cracks has a devastating impact on morale. Most doctors enter the profession because they want to build trusting, long-term relationships with patients and see them get healthier. Instead, primary care has increasingly become short-term and transactional. In many instances, we feel like we’re unable to give people the care they deserve unless we run ourselves into the ground.
When patients lose out on those strong relationships with primary care providers, it’s detrimental to their health. U.S. adults who regularly see a primary care doctor are 19% less likely to die prematurely compared with those who only rely on specialists.
One leading cause of this problem is excessive administrative tasks, which many primary care doctors spend more time on per visit than they do face-to-face with patients. On average, physicians spend nine hours a week filling in documentation for electronic health records (EHRs), forcing many of them to stretch workdays into the evenings. This phenomenon is so common that it’s frequently called “pajama time” as doctors continue working on charts after putting their kids to bed.
Another leading cause of burnout is information overload. In my experience, while doctors suck in oceans of valuable data about patients, it can be hard to process and synthesize all of it and craft a personalized treatment protocol in just a 15-minute appointment. I remember seeing 100 patients over a series of excessively short appointments in a single day. That’s not sustainable for anyone.
The average time a patient spends sitting in a waiting room (20 minutes) now exceeds the average length of a primary care appointment (10 to 15 minutes). Long wait times and general inconvenience drive down patient satisfaction and discourage some people from seeing doctors altogether
In an age when we can make appointments with everyone from dog walkers to lawyers in a few minutes, health care shouldn’t be such a hassle. Thankfully, practical, generative AI is helping to solve the problem and has the potential to improve lives.
Many companies are already designing platforms that can not only record and transcribe a conversation between a doctor and a patient, but also summarize, organize, and tag it. Some automatically generate comprehensive clinical summaries after patient-clinician conversations. The American Academy of Family Physicians had a group of doctors try a voice-enabled AI assistant, and they reported a 72% reduction in documentation time.
Some platforms go beyond automating documentation, and use generative AI to suggest treatment plans for doctors to review based on patients with similar symptoms. Other platforms synthesize data from clinical notes, lab reports, medical images, and more to create a comprehensive view of a patient’s medical history for their doctor. Machine learning can analyze the data to help providers identify treatment interventions and close gaps in care.
By allowing doctors to establish stronger personal relationships with patients, these technologies can make primary care a more sustainable and attractive profession for the next generation of providers. According to research from Stanford University, adding just 10 additional primary care doctors for every 100,000 Americans could increase overall U.S. life expectancy by nearly two months.
In short, generative AI capabilities are going to transform virtually every customer experience. When used responsibly, AI-driven software can let doctors spend more time being doctors and has tremendous promise to create a better and more sustainable healthcare experience for all.
Sunita Mishra, M.D., is the chief medical officer for Amazon Health Services.
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