From AI to regulatory burdens and work-life balance improvements, there is no shortage of healthcare industry developments that show promise for making the day-to-day operations smoother and more efficient for physicians.
Five physicians joined Becker’s to share exactly what would make their lives easier.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Q: As a physician, what’s one thing that would make your life easier right now?
Ed Corbett, MD. Internist and Former Deputy Chief Medical Officer of Health Catalyst, (Highland, Utah): Targeted technology to reduce administrative burden. Virtual scribes offer a glimpse of the future, but we need solutions that go beyond simply digitizing existing workflows. Reducing data entry is a start, but the real win lies in leveraging AI to analyze and extract relevant, granular data, continuously improving data quality. This creates the data foundation for a true healthcare transformation. AI systems are starting to handle automated coding, registry submissions, prior authorizations and countless other administrative tasks with far greater efficiency and accuracy. Agentic AI assistants are automating routine workflows, assisting with care coordination, and boosting patient engagement. If health systems are serious about improving physician well-being and reclaiming time for patient care, they need to aggressively adopt and integrate these existing technologies.
Edward Bujold, MD. Family Medicine Physician (Granite Falls, N.C.): Stop all preauthorizations for procedures and medications. My staff spends hours and hours per week working on this when they could spend more productive time taking care of patients and improving patient care.
Alex Shteynshlyuger, MD. Director of Urology at New York Urology Specialists (New York City): Practices are overburdened by paperwork, administrative burdens, rising costs and declining reimbursement. With a 1% Medicare fee schedule increase, roughly equivalent to $1 billion, there is one fix that can simultaneously give a respite from administrative burdens, lower administrative costs and give physician practices the equivalent of a 10% sustainable raise in Medicare fees (more than $10 billion per year).
The one fix that can accomplish all these goals simultaneously is just and fair enforcement of HIPAA administrative simplification requirements as intended by the plain language of the governing law, HIPAA of 1996, Section 1172(b) “Any standard adopted under this part shall be consistent with the objective of reducing the administrative costs of providing and paying for health care.” A just and fair enforcement of HIPAA administrative simplification requirements would mean an immediate stop to unwanted and costly “opt-out” virtual credit cards as a payment method for healthcare claims; these cost medical practices 3% to 8% of revenue. It will also stop the imposition of illegal [automated clearing house and electronic fund transfer] fees by vendors such as United Healthcare, Optum VPay, Zelis Payments and Echo Health on behalf of health plans that hired them, which also cost medical practices and hospitals 2% to 3% of revenue. This one fix will also prevent the illegal un-enrollment of physician practices from ERA and EFT electronic transactions, forcing physicians to re-enroll, as happened to millions of physician practices as a result of UnitedHealthcare’s owned Change Healthcare hacking incident last year. These forced and illegal un-enrollments cost medical practices and hospitals billions each year in administrative costs.
Collectively, each and every year, these issues cost over $10 billion to physician practices and hospitals.
Michael Cimmino, director of the National Standards Group at the Office of Healthcare Experience and Interoperability at CMS, in charge of enforcing these regulations, has not been helpful. There has been zero enforcement for the past 10 years.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the current CMS administrator, has the power to fix all of this overnight. I reached out to him asking for help, but have not heard back.
Elisabeth Erekson, MD. Founder of Obstetric Consulting Solutions (Portland, Maine): I would like to shift the focus in quality improvement efforts to concentrate on outcomes that matter … matter to patients, families, nurses and physicians, not just quality metrics that are easy to measure. The drive to improve quality has led to a proliferation of many quality metrics that are easy to measure, but often miss the mark for the things that truly matter. Additionally, when we center our efforts in quality around clinical improvement projects, we tend to be reactionary. This leads to fatigue, resistance and burnout.
When we center our quality efforts around things that truly matter and link it to our purpose, excellent patient care, teams feel that they are responding to something that matters.
While pragmatically we cannot eliminate the enormous amount of “check-the-box” quality metrics, I would love to see many of the “Yes/No” metrics eliminated. I would love to see healthcare focus on improvement around delays in diagnosis, miscommunication, anchoring bias and loss of situational awareness.
Brian Neal, MD. Attending Physician of Huntington Hospital and South Shore Emergency Department of Northwell Health (Huntington, N.Y.): One of the most pressing concerns in medicine today is the overreliance on Press Ganey scores and similar patient satisfaction metrics, especially when used to evaluate physician performance or tie into reimbursement models.
As an emergency physician, I see approximately 30 patients per 12-hour shift. That equates to about 4,320 patients per year. However, only around 120 surveys are returned annually — less than 3% of my total patient volume. These surveys often come from patients who are not critically ill or admitted, and the feedback typically does not reflect the complexity or acuity of the care delivered.
Basing physician evaluations, compensation or institutional rankings on such a small, nonrepresentative sample is not only statistically flawed but also harmful to morale. It’s an unfair metric that fails to capture the essence of clinical excellence, especially in emergency medicine, where patient expectations and outcomes can vary greatly.
The shift toward value-based care should not confuse customer service with medical care. While respect and communication are important, we did not enter this profession to cater to Yelp-style reviews. The foundations of good medicine are built on clinical judgment, patient outcomes, and evidence-based practice — not satisfaction scores from a small fraction of encounters.
This system is not only stressful and demoralizing, it’s poor science and ultimately poor medicine.
