From friction to foresight: how tech is optimizing the clinical day

When a health system hits capacity, so can its clinicians and care teams. How leaders are rethinking tools and technology, so the clinical day centers on the patient

Every hour a clinician spends hunting for information or coordinating care is an hour not spent with a patient. Sometimes the right information sits a few clicks too deep or scattered across screens. Just as often, the day gets rewritten by pressures no one saw coming: staff shortages leading to delays in needed paperwork for discharge, unavailable wheelchairs causing backups in bed turnover, internal patient transfers without available beds, or unexpected hospital surges. In 2025, U.S. inpatient volumes rose 5.3%, with many hospitals already operating at or near capacity. Add a growing global healthcare worker shortage, and the clinical day might move from the art of care to operational triage instead.

Dr. Hanh Le, Director of Digital and Customer Innovation for CareIntellect^TM for Operations at GE HealthCare, has seen the problem from both sides. Wanting to be a doctor for as long as she can remember, Dr. Le practiced as a physician before leaving the field, as many physicians do due to stress and burnout. Today, as a technologist, she focuses on solutions that can not only help address operational challenges, but also anticipate potential bottlenecks days in advance.  That foresight, paired with prescriptive recommendations, can help clinicians and hospital leaders proactively anticipate, mitigate, or address potential challenges and keep the focus where it belongs – on patient care.  

What actually fills a clinician's day?

Most of a clinician’s day can be consumed by coordination, explains Dr. Le: tracking, chasing and holding information in mind across several patients at once while balancing patient surges across departments. Care teams can spend up to 6 hours a day coordinating workflows and resolving issues manually, leaving less time for patients and ultimately, trending toward operational overwhelm.

“I remember meeting a young man whose test result showed he had cancer,” Dr. Le recalls. “I wanted to spend time with that person without making him feel rushed or alone. In that moment, I had to bring my medical knowledge, emotional presence, and humanity to an extraordinarily difficult moment.”

Often, Dr. Le found attention pulled away from such needed human moments and more towards operational details. From documenting diagnoses, physician orders and visit notes, to balancing administrative tasks, while at the same time, patient volumes surged across departments including the emergency room, leading a clinical day from care to that of chaos.

How can technologies including AI help reshape that clinical day? 

The most impactful technology is often the least visible. Working in the background, technology can identify and predict barriers that stall discharge, flag staffing needs as hospital pressure builds, and recommend actions to improve capacity and throughput.

And that type of technology earns its place when it helps inform human decision-making and clinical judgment rather than compete with it. “Technologies like AI can help clinicians stay human by predicting barriers and helping with recommendations for the next best step to progress care,” says Jan Beger, Global Head of AI Advocacy, GE HealthCare.  

“The measure isn't necessarily how much technologies like AI can do. It's how much they can give back,” Dr. Le says. “Every operational improvement is in service of better patient care. Operational bottlenecks could be averted, and clinicians are enabled to spend less time on desktop medicine and more time with patients practicing real medicine.”

This is where AI-enabled forecasting technology comes in that can surface emerging capacity constraints up to 72 hours in advance, along with recommended actions to address them, helping answer questions such as:

• Which units are currently, or projected to be, under or overstaffed?
• Which patients could be prioritized for imaging to support discharge progression?
• How do we accommodate the surgical demand tomorrow?
• Which patient could be prioritized for the next available bed?
• Will our resources support future demand across departments?

"As a physician, I know firsthand how much of a care team’s day can get consumed by coordinating and troubleshooting, taking time away from patients. That’s why this work is so personal to me. I’ve lived those challenges, and now I get to bring that experience to solutions like CareIntellect™ for Operations,” Dr. Le explains. “Being able to anticipate potential operational needs up to three days in advance, at the patient, department, and even enterprise level, can be game-changing. I often think about how valuable this kind of technology would have been to me when I was in clinical practice, helping manage some of the operational complexity and countless details around patient care so I could focus more on my patients.”  

While these tools focus on operations, the value of their impact could extend profoundly to the patient experience. A faster admission, a consult closed on time, or a barrier caught early may seem purely operational, but each can have implications for care delivery, and ultimately, for patients.

How can AI help optimize the clinical day? 

“Optimize” is easy to misuse. It should never mean pushing clinicians to move faster or take on more. The clinical day is already full. Optimizing it means removing the friction between clinicians and the reason they entered medicine.

In a more optimized clinical day, care teams are supported in identifying and prioritizing actions that matter most for patient flow as conditions shift, whether that’s expediting a transfer, coordinating a discharge or reallocating staff to a strained unit. The goal is a day running on proactive foresight with fewer last-minute scrambles, smoother patient movement, and more clinical time spent on care than on managing operational chaos.

“We want AI to take care of the repetitive, time-consuming, and routine things that pull clinicians away from why they chose this profession in the first place. So they can focus and do what only humans can do: care, listen, think, be present.  That’s the future of healthcare,” Beger says.

Indeed, a day full of friction takes time away from the patient.  Dr. Le argues that technology was never intended to occupy the center of a clinician's day. Instead, it should work quietly in the background, allowing clinicians and their patients to remain at the forefront.