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By Rajiv Sharma
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America’s health care workforce is running out of room to absorb more pressure. The answer cannot be to keep asking doctors, nurses, and other caregivers to see more patients, complete more paperwork, and stretch themselves further.
The American Hospital Association’s 2026 Health Care Workforce Scan makes the warning clear. Persistent shortages, rising patient demand, and burnout are converging.
The country needs to use AI now to remove unnecessary work from health care before the people holding the system together are pushed further out of it.
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The people at the center of this crisis deserve to be seen as people, not labor units. A nurse who sits beside a frightened patient, a physician making a difficult decision, or a technician helping someone through an uncertain diagnosis entered health care to make a difference.
They did not sign up to spend their best hours fighting administrative systems.
Yet that is increasingly the reality. New patient appointment wait times now average 31 days nationwide across 15 major U.S. metropolitan areas in 2025.
That delay has consequences beyond inconvenience. A patient waits longer for answers, a family lives longer with uncertainty, and a clinician inherits a larger backlog.
Eventually, the pressure reaches the person sitting across from the patient.
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The Cost of Burnout
Burnout then becomes more than a workplace issue. It becomes an access, quality, and financial issue.
Emotional stress remains the leading reason nurses leave their roles. Replacing a single bedside nurse now costs hospitals more than $61,000.
Every departure adds pressure to the remaining workforce and another expense to a system already carrying enormous costs.
The instinctive response has been to add capacity wherever possible: more appointments, tighter schedules, more staff when they can be found.
But adding people to inefficient processes does not solve inefficiency. It simply gives the inefficiency more people to consume.
That is why the next major health care investment must be efficiency.
AI Can Give Clinicians Time Back
Consider how much of a clinician’s expertise is spent away from the patient. Physicians devote less than half of their working hours to direct patient care.
The rest includes documentation, coordination, administration, and other tasks necessary to keep the system operating. Some of that work will always require human judgment. Much of it does not.
AI can change that equation.
Today, AI can already help clinicians find relevant research faster, summarize information, organize records, and support decision-making. It can also tackle the administrative work that follows every patient encounter.
The objective is to return more of a professional’s time to the work only that professional can do.
But deploying AI without fixing the underlying processes will produce limited results. Health care is fragmented across states, insurers, Medicare, Medicaid, and individual institutions.
The same patient need can trigger different forms, rules, and approval processes depending on location. Technology cannot efficiently automate chaos.
Standardization therefore has to accompany AI adoption. The government has an important role in simplifying rules across state lines, but policymakers need expertise from people who understand both health care operations and technology.
That expertise must enter the conversation with urgency. Waiting for every process to become perfect before modernizing it guarantees more wasted time.
A System That Works for Everyone
The stakes extend far beyond hospitals. Every American eventually becomes a patient, cares for a parent, raises a child who gets sick, or depends on a health care professional during a vulnerable moment.
When the system wastes a clinician’s time, that cost eventually reaches all of us through longer waits, higher expenses, reduced access, or exhausted caregivers.
Now imagine a system where routine administrative work happens largely in the background, information reaches clinicians when they need it, and standardized processes allow AI to handle repetitive tasks across organizations.
Professionals have more time to listen, diagnose, treat, and reassure. Patients get more access to the people they came to see. Hospitals spend less money replacing exhausted workers and more money improving care.
That future requires action, not another round of discussion. Health care leaders should identify the tasks consuming the most clinical time, bring clinicians and technology experts together, and deploy AI against measurable sources of waste.
Policymakers should accelerate sensible standardization. Leaders who wait for perfect conditions will preserve the conditions causing the crisis.
Rajiv Sharma is the founder and CEO of Knack Systems, with more than two decades of experience in enterprise technology and SAP solutions. The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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