Healthcare systems around the world are organized in vastly different ways. They vary by funding models, organizational structures, geography, and cultural expectations. Yet beneath this diversity lies a shared and intensifying pressure: sustaining sufficient workforce capacity to keep demand in balance with supply.  

Across systems, this balance is increasingly under strain. Populations are aging, care needs are becoming more complex, productivity gains are lagging behind demand, and innovation is constrained by legacy systems. Workforce morale continues to erode under sustained pressure.

What is striking is that these challenges are not limited to traditionally resource‑constrained systems. They are increasingly visible in some of the world’s most funded and staffed health systems.

Whether centralized or decentralized, publicly funded or insurance‑based, rural or urban, the same patterns have emerged: too few healthcare professionals, workloads growing faster than hiring pipelines, and an expanding gap between the care that is needed and how the workforce is currently deployed.

This shared reality presents an opportunity. Digitalization is increasingly being used to reduce administrative burden and enable hybrid care models. AI‑supported clinical pathways and workforce optimization tools are positioning digitalization not only as an efficiency lever, but as the foundation for a more sustainable workforce model.

When used thoughtfully, these technologies do not replace healthcare professionals. They enable clinicians to work at their full capacity, relieve pressure where demand is most acute, and ultimately improve patient outcomes.

Against this backdrop, we challenge ourselves to step beyond familiar practices and consider entirely new ways of addressing the global workforce challenge.

In the following article, we pose a bold question: what would healthcare look like if we rebuild the organization of work from the ground up?

To explore what could be possible beyond today’s operating realities, we introduce two thought experiments. Each examines how healthcare work might be redesigned for a digital era, and what that could mean for capacity, cost, and workforce sustainability.

  • Digital‑first by default rethinks access and care delivery to unlock clinical time.
  • No‑admin clinical care considers what becomes possible when administrative work is removed from care delivery.

What is digital‑first by default?

Digital-first by default is built around one clear organizing principle: routine demand is handled digitally as the standard, while physical care capacity is deliberately protected for urgency, complexity and care that requires in‑person interaction.

This is not about replacing face‑to‑face care. It is about protecting it.

For healthcare leaders facing chronic workforce shortages, rising demand and growing dependence on overtime and agency staff, digital first is not an incremental optimization, but a structural response.

Capacity is not created by asking more from an already stretched workforce, but by redesigning how demand enters and moves through the system.

How would digital-first by default work?

In a digital-first system, AI facilitates interaction between patients, clinicians and the organization.

Patients enter care through a single digital front door, where clinically validated generative AI guides medical professionals to provide structured information on the patient upfront, such as symptoms, context and relevant history.

Using this upfront input, AI-supported triage agents assess urgency, surface risk signals and route patients to the right pathway, enabling direct scheduling of subsequent appointments without human intervention.

From there, care pathways default to AI‑orchestrated workflows. AI agents could deliver self‑care guidance, coordinate asynchronous clinical review, and set up virtual consultations.

Where physical care adds value, escalation happens automatically based on predefined clinical criteria. Diagnostics can be ordered upfront by AI, through available patient data, so consultations focus on interpretation and decision‑making rather than information gathering.

Over time, this evolves into anticipatory, agent‑driven triage. Rather than waiting for patients to seek help, AI agents continuously update clinical profiles using structured patient input, EHR data and contextual signals.

What more can AI agents do in a digital-first model?

These AI agents can trigger early interventions, such as proactive self‑management advice, follow‑up questions, diagnostic orders or asynchronous clinician review before deterioration occurs. This reduces avoidable acute demand and improves outcomes.

AI agents also reshape clinical and administrative work. Routine tasks are no longer absorbed by clinicians but handled end‑to‑end by-digital agents: scheduling and rescheduling appointments, answering non‑medical queries, preparing referrals and orders, drafting letters, running financial checks, and capturing consultations directly in the EHR.

Clinical work is decomposed into short, task‑based activities that AI agents can route, prioritize and batch across teams. Real‑time interaction is deliberately reserved for complexity, judgement and relational care.

The result? Healthcare professionals gain back valuable time and mental space, time they can spend where it matters most: on human connection, meaningful interactions, and the personal side of care.

The impact is tangible: more capacity without longer hours, less cognitive load, and more time for meaningful patient interaction.

How can we make digital-first by default possible?

Making digital‑first care the norm requires deliberate design and end‑to‑end execution, not isolated digital initiatives. The journey towards that extends from assessing current pathways and operating models to designing and scaling digital and AI‑enabled care.

A good starting point is to map and redesign clinical and administrative processes so digital and physical care work as one system. This needs clear clinical guardrails, such as defined escalation paths, safety controls and oversight.

From there, AI and digital tools are then used to handle routine tasks, while administrative work is re‑reengineered to free up clinicians’ time for more complex care and patient interaction.

Beyond technology, digital‑first ways of working must be embedded, including more flexible, demand‑led staffing models and the ability to share capacity across teams. Support should also extend to system enablers, such as funding models, governance, digital inclusion and responsible AI use.

The aim is a care model that is more integrated, scalable, and resilient, while preserving focus on patient needs.

What is no‑admin clinical care?

Our second thought experiment extends the above thinking further. It asks what healthcare could look like if administrative work were removed entirely from clinical care delivery.

This starts from a simple but radical premise: Clinical time should be spent on care, not clerical work.

In this model, administrative tasks are not optimized or reduced: they are designed out of care delivery altogether. For example, calling, documenting, booking appointments, creating orders, chasing information and re-entering data are no longer part of the clinical day.

Administration is handled automatically by the system, captured at source, orchestrated in the background, or eliminated entirely. The result is a care environment where healthcare professionals focus primarily on diagnosis, treatment, and human connection.

Why is no-admin clinical care needed?

Across geographies, demand is growing faster than capacity. All too often clinical time is consumed by work that does not require clinical expertise.

No‑admin clinical care is our response to this. It offers a future state in which administrative work is fundamentally removed from the care delivery process.

This would enable healthcare professionals to fully focus on clinical decision‑making, patient interaction, and outcomes. Naturally, this has implications for capacity, workforce sustainability, and the everyday practice of care.

The need for greater digitization in healthcare is highlighted in the 2026 eGovernment Benchmark insight report. Undertaken on behalf of the European Commission, the annual monitoring exercise found that online services for the ‘health’ life event across EU Member States were the least digital of all those assessed.

What would no-admin clinical care look like?

At the core of no‑admin care is structured information captured once and reused everywhere. A shared, standardized patient dataset, covering essentials such as demographics, allergies, medications and diagnostics, is accessible across systems.

In this model, clinicians only add or amend information when something genuinely changes, drastically reducing duplication and fragmentation. Care pathways shift from manually managed steps to self‑executing digital workflows.

What role will AI have in no-admin clinical care?

Once clinical intent is set, AI‑supported workflow engines coordinate diagnostics, schedule appointments, notify patients and prepare downstream activities automatically. Instead of staff “booking” and “chasing,” pathways adapt dynamically as new information becomes available.

Inside clinical encounters, ambient AI technologies remove documentation from the workflow. Voice‑enabled tools capture conversations in real time, generate structured notes, extract codes and populate orders automatically. Clinicians review and validate, rather than create, documentation. Forms, summaries and coding emerge as a by‑product of care, not a task within it.

Over time, the health record evolves into a continuously updated clinical narrative, enriched by voice, system‑generated insights and patient‑reported outcomes. Documentation shifts from administrative burden to real‑time clinical intelligence, accessed only when interpretation or nuance is required.

How can we make no-admin care possible?

Making no‑admin care a reality requires more than technology. It means redesigning data, workflows, governance and behaviors together.

The following are all important steps healthcare leaders need to take to move towards no-admin care:

  • Rethink care pathways to remove unnecessary administrative work, rather than just digitizing it
  • Use automation and AI to support scheduling, coordination, documentation and clinical workflows
  • Strengthen data foundations so information can flow without manual re‑entry
  • Update policies and governance to enable work to be eliminated, not shifted
  • Support adoption so teams can rely on new ways of working without duplicating effort.

For leaders, no‑admin clinical care becomes a credibility test: only integrated redesign of workflows, AI and governance truly reduces burden. 

What can healthcare leaders do right now to make change happen?

Our objective with this article has been to explore how healthcare leaders can re-imagine healthcare and rebuild the organization of work from the ground up. This demands radical change at many levels.

Making this change sustainable requires more than technology. Digital inclusion must be designed to ensure safe and equitable access.

That’s not all. Funding models and incentives, still heavily weighted toward face-to-face activity, need to evolve. Service rhythms and staffing models must shift away from building-centered rosters toward demand-led operating models.

In a world of digital-first by default, virtual capacity becomes flexible and shared. This allows suitable work to be routed across organizations and teams, rather than absorbed locally during peaks.

Recommendations for healthcare leaders

Bold decisions are needed. Here are some concrete steps healthcare leaders can take to accelerate this journey:

  • Form the vision first – don’t wait for your proof-of concept to end before thinking about scaling up
  • Identify the main bottlenecks and workforce pressures, along with AI use cases that arise from them
  • Identify risks, safeguards, and guardrails to ensure governance and build trust
  • Review your processes – don’t simply automate as is, but involve all parties in discussing what could work differently or better
  • Control the adoption of AI. Put central controls in place to stop people going rogue with overlapping AI solutions and digital tools
  • Tackle financial barriers up front to ensure sustainable financing – and make room for innovation within your finance strategy
  • Consider cooperation and collaboration with other healthcare organizations – and explore interoperable systems to enable this
  • Investigate modes of secure data sharing within select communities, such as a health data platform.

Unlocking capacity and reducing admin burden with new thinking

Digital‑first by default shows how rethinking the flow of demand and the organization of work can unlock capacity without asking more of an already stretched workforce. It reframes digital not as an add‑on, but as a structural lever for protecting clinical time and restoring sustainability.

Adopting a no‑admin clinical care model can make an immediate and tangible impact: fewer inboxes, fewer manual handovers, less re‑keying of data, and more meaningful time for frontline teams. However, it isn’t simply about using digital tools to automate administrative processes, rather it requires existing processes to be rethought for a digital world.

Re-imagining the way healthcare works will take bold decisions. Is your organization ready to explore what could be possible beyond today’s operating realities?

Get in touch with our healthcare experts to explore “what’s next” as work is redesigned for a digital era.