Reduce clinician load by simplifying work before digitizing it
Digital tools do not fix broken workflows. Leaders need to remove friction first, then automate what is stable and safe, with clear standards and ownership.
The question behind this piece
Health systems often respond to clinician burden by buying or building digital tools. The intention is good, but the result is frequently more clicks, more workarounds, and more frustration. The root cause is rarely the absence of a tool. It is a workflow that is unclear, fragmented, or overloaded with unnecessary steps. How do you reduce clinician load by simplifying work first, then digitizing only what is stable, standard, and safe?
Why this matters now
Capacity is tighter. Staffing constraints, higher demand, and more complex care coordination mean workflow friction is no longer just irritating. It becomes a throughput and safety risk. Every extra handoff and every rework loop consumes scarce clinician time and increases the chance of missed information.
Digital investment has also accelerated. Many organizations now run layered ecosystems: core platforms, add-ons, point solutions, and local workarounds. Without workflow discipline, these tools add cognitive load and produce inconsistent practices across units.
Old approaches fail because they digitize variability. When you automate a messy process, you do not get speed. You get messy speed, at scale.
Automating chaos does not create capacity. It multiplies chaos.
Our perspective
Reducing clinician load requires a reliability mindset: define the work, remove what does not add value, standardize what remains, then digitize with guardrails. The sequence matters.
Start with “where time goes,” not “what tool to buy.” Identify the workflows that consume disproportionate time and generate disproportionate frustration. Common candidates include consult requests, discharge planning, medication reconciliation, documentation duplication, approvals, and cross-unit communication loops. The point is not to fix everything. It is to choose a small set of workflows where burden and risk are both high.
Make the diagnostic fast and grounded. Combine time-in-motion observation, frontline interviews, and a few operational signals (delays, rework volume, escalation frequency, and exceptions). Then size the problem in simple terms clinicians and leaders recognize: time lost, handoffs per case, and repeat touches. This creates focus and prevents “tool shopping” as the default response.
Simplify in a specific order: remove steps, remove handoffs, remove ambiguity. Many burdens persist because steps exist “just in case,” because ownership is unclear, or because exception handling becomes the real workflow. A practical redesign does three things:
- Remove steps that are redundant, duplicative, or only exist because the downstream system is unreliable.
- Reduce handoffs by bundling tasks, clarifying roles, and using simple checklists to prevent rework.
- Define a standard path and an exception path so clinicians are not improvising every edge case.
Standard work must be designed as practice, not written as policy. It should be minimal, usable during a busy shift, and co-designed with clinicians. Specify entry criteria, required information, timing expectations, and escalation points. Include the few exceptions that occur often, and make the exception handling explicit. The goal is not rigidity. The goal is consistency where consistency reduces burden and risk.
Then build an operating model that protects clinician time. Many workflow burdens persist because support functions are not designed around clinical flow. Discharge planning, bed management, transport, diagnostics, and pharmacy often operate with their own priorities and timing. Clinicians become the integrators by default. A clinician-load operating model clarifies end-to-end ownership, what work is done by clinicians versus support roles, what decisions can be made without escalation, and what daily cadence keeps flow moving. This is where operational excellence and customer experience meet. Clinicians are a primary user group, and their experience shapes throughput and quality.
Only then should you digitize and automate. Digitization is most valuable when it codifies a clean workflow and reduces repetitive work. Automation should be supervised and bounded: clear inputs, clear outputs, and clear escalation when uncertainty is high. GenAI can help in narrow, controlled places like summarizing information, drafting routine text, and guiding structured triage, but only with clinical oversight, clear handoff rules, and auditability. The goal is lower cognitive load, not new risk.
Digitization should codify a clean workflow, not compensate for a broken one.
What we offer and how we can help
At Strathen Group, we help healthcare leaders run a Workflow Simplification Diagnostic sprint to identify the highest-friction clinician workflows, simplify steps and handoffs, and deliver standard workflows that are ready for safe digitization with clear ownership and KPIs.
