Across health systems, chief medical information officers say physician frustration is not driven by a single broken workflow, but by the compounding effect of documentation burden, chart review overload, inbox volume, payer friction and fragmented digital tools that pull clinicians away from patient care.
While these pain points are chronic, CMIOs say they have reached a new level of intensity as patient volumes rise, records grow more complex and administrative demands continue to expand.
Documentation and inbox management surfaced as the most universal sources of friction.
“One of the biggest friction points for physicians involves managing the high volume of administrative tasks such as documentation and inbox management,” said Deepti Pandita, MD, CMIO and vice president of clinical informatics at UCI Health in Irvine, Calif. She noted that the time spent on clerical work directly reduces time for patients.
Amer Saati, MD, CMIO at Adventist Health in Roseville, Calif., described a similar pattern — one driven not only by documentation burden, but by fragmented workflows across EHRs, analytics platforms and care coordination tools. The result, he said, is unnecessary cognitive load that forces clinicians to context-switch throughout the day.
Several leaders emphasized that chart review, rather than note-writing, has become one of the most draining tasks as patient records swell with unstructured data.
“Chart review and discharge summarization are workflows which create a tremendous amount of friction for physicians,” said Jennifer Goldman, DO, CMIO at Hollywood, Fla.-based Memorial Healthcare System. Her organization has seen rapid adoption of AI chart summarization and automated hospital course drafts because they directly reduce this burden.
Joseph Evans, MD, vice president and chief health information officer at Sentara Health in Norfolk, Va., framed the issue as both a time and safety concern.
“At least 80% of the data in our EHRs is unstructured,” he said, warning that even when clinicians do find the time to review records, cognitive overload can cause them to miss important details. His team is deploying semantic search and summarization tools to convert free-text records into actionable clinical intelligence.
Nadeem Ahmed, MD, CMIO at The Valley Health System in Paramus, N.J., said reviewing clinical data has become more time-consuming than placing orders or documenting — particularly when data lives across multiple non-integrated systems.
“The sheer volume of clinical data for healthcare providers to review … is simply overwhelming,” he said. His organization is implementing an AI-enabled platform to synthesize data across multiple EHRs and surface insights directly at the point of care.
Beyond documentation and chart review, payer-driven administrative tasks — especially prior authorizations and medication access — emerged as other major sources of friction.
“The biggest friction points are documentation/inbox burden, medication access and care coordination across settings,” said Usman Akhtar, MD, CMIO at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington. His team is prioritizing real-time benefit checks, in-workflow electronic prior authorization, ambient AI documentation and smarter inbox triage to prevent prescriptions from stalling at the pharmacy.
Annie Ideker, MD, CMIO at HealthPartners in Bloomington, Minn., echoed that prior authorizations are a persistent drain on clinician time.
“We are actively exploring technologies that can reduce the administrative burden placed on our clinicians,” she said, particularly AI tools that extract and synthesize patient record information to meet payer requirements with minimal physician effort.
Jason La Marca, MD, CMIO at Los Angeles-based Mission Community Hospital, described the broader picture as a set of recurring, deeply entrenched pain points — including documentation, coding, email overload, referrals, authorizations and transitions of care.
“These problems are not new. They have been a recurrent bane in our existence,” he said. What has changed, he added, is the growing availability of ambient AI scribes, chart summarization tools, inbox automation platforms and emerging care coordination solutions.
Nevertheless, CMIOs pointed to a shared strategy: using AI and automation not to replace clinical judgment, but to offload repetitive work and protect physician time for high-value patient interactions.
Dr. Pandita said UCI Health is investing in voice recognition, generative AI and AI agents to streamline documentation and administrative tasks. Dr. Saati said Adventist Health is prioritizing ambient documentation, intelligent inbox triage and deeper integration of decision support into front-line workflows to reduce cognitive strain. Dr. Goldman and Dr. Evans both highlighted chart summarization as one of the most promising tools for giving clinicians meaningful time back.
Several leaders also emphasized protocol-driven automation for routine care.
Dr. Ideker said HealthPartners is pursuing automation for recurring tasks such as renewing prescriptions, ordering routine labs and managing preventive care workflows.
“Our desire is to reserve our clinicians’ time for those patient-care activities which require the expertise and critical thinking skills of our clinicians,” she said.
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