AI-Led Virtual Care Teams: Restoring Clinician and Care Team Purpose

The word “patient” is derived from the Latin terms ‘patior’ (to suffer, endure, or bear) and ‘patiens’ (one who is suffering or enduring something).

The patient, in this language, is truly passive—bearing whatever suffering is necessary and tolerating patiently the interventions of the outside expert.
 – Julia Neuberger

Clinicians enter medicine driven by purpose: alleviating suffering, fostering health, and building relationships. Yet today’s administrative burdens both inside and outside the EHR erode that mission, causing  clinicians and care teams to endure an existential “suffering” of digital chores. This threatens clinician well-being, patient trust, and the financial sustainability of health systems already coping with thin margins.

Rising administrative burden and workforce strain

Staffing shortages are projected to intensify, with reports forecasting a shortfall of roughly 100,000 healthcare workers by 2028 across roles from nursing assistants to clinicians. Aging populations, clinician burnout, and impending retirements exacerbate this gap. Studies document that clinicians devote nearly half of scheduled clinic time to EHR-related tasks, with substantial after-hours work reducing time for rest or professional development. Excessive digital chores mean less direct patient interaction and less mental bandwidth for nuanced clinical reasoning and empathetic dialogue. With up to 80 percent of clinical data residing outside of structured EHR fields in some organizations, staff are also spending significant time scanning documents, which compounds  administrative work and leads to delays in care.

These dynamics jeopardize every touchpoint of the patient journey, affecting access, outcomes, and patient experience. The ripple effects include inefficiencies, errors, eroded patient experience, regulatory risk, and financial strain. For health systems, the opportunity cost is high: lost clinician productivity, higher turnover, and recruitment costs, further deepening staffing challenges.

The influx of the inbox

Patient portals offer transparency in care and correlate with patient satisfaction when managed effectively. However, the volume of portal communications and other “inbox” items have surged since the COVID-19 pandemic. Advice requests, inter- and intra-team notes, refill and authorization requests, test results all require context reconstruction, decision making, and documentation. Each portal message adds, on average, over two minutes of EHR time; other tasks often take far longer. Aggregated across a practice, this equates to hours of daily administrative work. Clinicians and their care teams feel implicit expectations to respond promptly. Without efficient triage, delegation, and processing support, the inbox chore undermines core responsibilities: building trusted relationships, deep thinking on complex cases, and delivering quality care with better outcomes.

Embracing AI and virtual care teams

As healthcare moves from pilots to broader AI deployments, early evidence suggests tangible relief for overburdened clinicians. Several surveys indicate many institutions now prioritize AI to streamline routine workflows and reclaim clinician time. These efforts not only promise efficiency gains but also address critical workforce shortages by allowing nurses, medical assistants, front and back desk staff, and clinicians to refocus on care delivery rather than paperwork.

Six AI-enabled use cases include:

●        Ambient and other clinical documentation solutions: Ambient AI platforms listen to clinician-patient conversations (with consent) and draft progress notes or encounter summaries for clinician review.

●        Inbox triage and prioritization: Classifying messages that can be handled with minimal clinical input vs. those requiring deeper review.

●        Prior authorization and prescription renewals: Automating data gathering and preliminary approvals to expedite renewals.

●        Document management and data abstraction: Centralizing scanned documents and extracting key data points into structured fields.

●        Intelligent decision support at-the-elbow knowledge: Surfacing relevant clinical guidelines, flagging high-risk features, and suggesting care pathway options during the visit and during clinical data review, enabling clinicians and care teams to make informed decisions more efficiently while ensuring oversight remains human-led.

●        Workflow orchestration and coordination: Virtual care teams integrate outputs with roles across nursing, medical assistants, and administrative staff, assigning tasks based on AI-driven prioritization. Lower-license tasks shift away from higher-licensed personnel, improving throughput and career satisfaction.

Yet the path from potential to positive impact demands vigilance. Most AI tools cannot simply be dropped into most EHRs. The ability to access upstream and collateral information with current task data to create automated, seamless, and secure downstream output is a complicated one. It involves the coordination of multiple layers and sources of data, clinical, and administrative algorithms tuned to institutional norms and patient demographics. Additionally, a deep sensitivity and awareness of the local EHR environment within which these more historically manual workflows have resided is key. While technology can help free clinicians’ and care teams’ time, it cannot always do this alone, without human assistance.

Implementation demands caution. Over-automation risks depersonalizing care or missing nuance: algorithms may overlook contextual factors, non-textual cues, or social determinants that inform decision-making. Patients may feel “ghosted” if standardized messages replace genuine interactions. Clinicians and care teams may feel “replaced” or placed at increased medicolegal risk without an appropriate ability to override teed up actions and maintain ultimate decision-making authority.

Without robust safeguards, we risk eroding clinician and care team trust as well as patient trust and missing subtle contextual cues that only humans can currently discern. By striking this delicate balance – leveraging pragmatic AI-infused technology to absorb routine “chores” while safeguarding relational, empathetic care –  virtual care teams can help organizations build loyal workforces, loyal patient relationships, and long-term sustainable models that honor both human expertise and innovation.

Restoring purpose and deepening relationships

Ultimately, the promise of AI in healthcare is to restore clinicians and care teams to their motivating work: applying critical assessment and diagnosis to every case, and nurturing therapeutic relationships. By relieving routine inbox tasks, paperwork, and data abstraction, virtual care teams help clinical care teams regain cognitive bandwidth for reflective practice, shared decision-making, and personalized patient education. Patients, in turn, feel heard, engaged, and empowered rather than passive “sufferers.”  AI-enabled virtual care teams offer tangible relief when executed thoughtfully and sensitively. These enhancements must augment – not supplant – the care teams’ role as expert guide and empathetic partner. When balanced effectively, technology becomes a tool that empowers clinicians to fulfill their original calling, strengthens patient trust, and supports sustainable care delivery.

Ben Crocker, M.D., is Senior Vice President of Care Design and Innovation at IKS Health.