From a December 2025 conversation between AlignIQ co-founders Dan Garmat and Caroline Stauss, responding to Vox’s Explain It to Me episode “Paging Dr. Chatbot.”
AI could take much of the administrative load off doctors. Whether that means better care or just more throughput depends on how organizations choose to use it.
Key takeaways
- Administrative work has long been the low-hanging fruit for analytics, data and AI in healthcare.
- The worry from the podcast: if doctors no longer spend half their time on data entry, administrators may simply double their patient load.
- Patients and doctors both want more than seven minutes together. Whether AI delivers that depends on the economics.
- Using AI only to do more of the same is the least creative option. The next round will use it to make the experience better.
Try this with your team
Think of one place your organization could use AI to do more of something. What would it look like to use it to do that thing better instead?
Going further
If your team is choosing where to apply AI first, the free Can I Use AI for This Workflow? tool helps you weigh value against risk.
Sources mentioned
- Vox, Explain It to Me: “Paging Dr. Chatbot” (podcast episode)
More from this series
Transcript
Lightly edited from YouTube’s automatic captions for readability. Wording and order are the speakers’ own.
These tools could make it so that doctors, and the healthcare system in general, don’t need to do as much administrative activity. For years people have been saying this is the low-hanging fruit for analytics, data and AI.
What the questioner asked about is: is it possible that doctors won’t have to do as much of this administrative busy work that’s so exhausting and draining, and they can spend more time with patients, which is what brought them into medicine in the first place?
But then what he brought up is: what if the administrators say, okay, you don’t have to spend half your time doing data entry, so now you have to see twice as many patients?
“Would that be an issue with costs, and drive up costs?”
I think there’s a big opportunity with AI to make the quality of the experience better for everyone. Patients want more than seven minutes with their doctor, and the doctor wants more than seven minutes with the patient. The people involved want it to be a higher quality experience. The question is whether the economics will allow it.
He said the business of medicine is what reduced the quality of medicine, so I think that is where he’s worried. And I think that’s the first round of thinking about how to use AI from a business perspective: you can make things more efficient. That’s the least creative way of using AI, using it so that people can do more, without improving the underlying problem.
I think the next round is going to be using AI in a way that makes the experience better. You can still go to a doctor and see them for seven minutes, and your doctor is immediately going to be seeing someone else, and all of the benefit has been sent to the business model.
Or you can go to a doctor who is using AI in a more creative way than just efficiency, and you see them for 15 minutes or whatever it is. I think ways of using AI that increase quality and meet needs that currently get ignored are where the next round of innovation is going to be.