Healthcare is overwhelmed by hidden work. Task overload, fragmented workflows, and manual follow-ups are silently undermining care quality, clinician well-being, and operational efficiency.
In this episode of The Health Tech Edge, host Mike Moore sits down with Dr. Michael Docktor, practicing pediatric gastroenterologist and CEO of Dock Health, to spotlight one of the most overlooked yet foundational challenges in healthcare: task management.
Despite EHRs and digital transformation efforts, many care teams still rely on email chains, spreadsheets, and sticky notes to track essential work. The result? Critical tasks fall through the cracks, administrative teams burn out, and patients wait longer for the care they need.
This conversation unpacks why tasking is the missing layer in healthcare infrastructure—and how redefining it as a core operational capability can unlock real productivity, smarter workflows, and better patient outcomes. From fax-based referrals and ambient documentation to AI-powered workflow automation and agentic task orchestration, Dr. Docktor brings a clinician’s eye and a technologist’s mindset to the discussion.
Keep reading ther summarized conversation or listen to the full episode to hear why rethinking task management might be the most impactful place to start your healthcare innovation journey.
Mike Moore: I think a lot of people might look at this and ask, “Well, isn’t that what the EHR is for?” Whether it’s Epic, PointClickCare, or any of the other platforms out there, it’s easy to assume that existing systems should already handle these kinds of tasks. So why is there a need for additional tools?
But what I’m hearing from you is that they don’t—at least not in a way that truly supports the workflow needs of clinicians.
Most of us aren’t in that environment day to day, but we’ve all seen the back of a physician sitting at a computer during an exam. They’re in Epic or another EHR, going through the motions. But clearly there’s a gap between what those systems are capturing and what actually needs to happen to ensure care gets followed through.
That’s where this opportunity lies. There’s space for another layer of software—something purpose-built to bridge that gap. Tools that clinicians will actually use because they align with how work really gets done.
Dr. Michael Docktor: Keep me honest here, because I can go on for a while on this one. First and foremost, it's a great fallacy that EHRs are focused on tasks. They're wonderful systems, we spend a lot of time in them, they document, prescribe, and bill well, and if you look at any healthcare organization, large and small, they all have other things that they use, like email. We coordinate care with reply all emails and have spreadsheets and paper checklists for all the stuff that we have to do outside the EHR. The reality is, very little data is captured around that. Very little of that is automated, coordinated, and collaborated on. There's this administrative half of healthcare that is not accounted for in the electronic health record. It exists in silos and often without any real accountability. So, fundamentally, we believe that there needs to be a tasking solution in healthcare and we're the first to really go big with that concept.
And I'll be a little bit provocative and say that as a technologist at heart, I love new tools. I was the clinical lead at Boston Children's Hospital during the early Nuance days, and I'm excited about all the ambient technologies that are out there. But as with every technology, there are unintended consequences. I truly believe that while documentation has gotten easier and reduced the burden, we've made it easier to just throw tasks into a notes and for tasks to get buried more easily because we haven't intentionally crafted our notes and written things down with our hands and burned it into our brain. And so it's become a dumping ground for more tasks to fall through the cracks. I think for us, it is about surfacing those tasks, ensuring that those things have accountability around them to get done by the right people, and ideally, if some of those tasks can be automated, even better.
Mike Moore: I think one question that pops up in my mind is if I'm a healthcare leader and I'm listening to this podcast, I might wonder "Is he talking about us?". Is this something that you see universally across healthcare or is it something that you think is only in certain organizations?
Dr. Mike Docktor: It's everywhere. I think that there are some sophisticated virtual-first health tech companies that have been more thoughtful about building systems around this, because they have the wherewithal to be lean and be thoughtful about their technology stack. And so they pick an EHR and an operational backbone, and that is often us, because, these folks are familiar with tools like JIRA, for engineers, and Monday, Asana, and Trello for product people to manage projects and so those are the standouts.
From small mental health and concierge practices to primary care clinics, hospitals, and health systems, they all face the same problem: there's no clearly defined process. They lack an operational or administrative backbone—no orchestration layer to manage tasks. Instead, they rely on Excel files, Post-it notes, and fax machines.
At some of the top hospitals in the country, 80% of referrals still come in by fax. Staff then manually transcribe those faxes into the EHR and email patients or referring providers to acknowledge the referral. These are all tasks that could—and should—be automated.
By creating structure around these processes, we can reduce the burden on care teams—both clinical and administrative. That means improving the patient experience, the provider experience, and helping teams breathe easier by taking some of that manual, error-prone work off their plates. Because right now, too many things are slipping through the cracks.
Mike Moore: We've been talking a lot about the clinician point of view and the clinician experience, but what you just brought up is that there is the rest of the organization. The administrative personnel, medical assistants, nurses, and everyone else who's under the same roof.
And they’re feeling the pressure too.
Burnout and frustration aren’t limited to physicians, nurse practitioners, or PAs. It affects the entire care team. That’s why there’s a real opportunity here to address a broader set of needs. When we design solutions that support everyone in the system—not just clinicians—we improve how care is delivered. And ultimately, that benefits the patient. That’s what we’re working toward.
Dr. Michael Docktor: There's a real focus on the clinician burnout, and it's super real, and I don’t want to diminish that—it’s part of why I’m here. But what’s often underrecognized, even on the clinical side, is how much of that burnout stems from administrative work. It’s the kind of work no one wants to be doing—not even administrative staff—because so much of it is mundane, routine, and easily offloaded to technology.
That’s where the opportunity lies. By automating the repetitive tasks, we can free up time for the meaningful, human-to-human interactions that brought people into healthcare in the first place. The work that actually matters. That’s what excites us.
Mike Moore: When you look at some of the customers that you're working with already who are adopting this task management system, what are some of the benefits that they're seeing as they introduce it, get it up and running and get everybody on board?
Dr. Michael Docktor: I mean, it's multi factor right there. They're seeing efficiencies just in the administration of that work. Take referral management, again, as an example. You have a process that is highly laborious from a manual perspective: you're literally taking a fax off of a pile of paper, transcribing that into the electronic health record, and then either calling a patient or sending them an email and lastly you're sending a email to the referring provider. This takes an hour or two per patient collectively for all of that administrative work, which largely can be automated. And so we're seeing benefits whereinstead of a two hour process, it's now a two minute process where we're using AI to ingest the data from a fax, automatically creating a record for the patient the EHR, and automatically sending an email to the provider, based on whether they are an appropriate patient or not.
Those are just simple moving data around, automating tasks, creating a preferred path of a workflow. So seeing administrative gains there and then, of course, you improve throughput. Using referral management as an example, you improve access, improve the provider referring provider experience, and you improve the people who are managing this process, because instead of doing all that manual stuff, they're not focused on those few phone calls that they have to make to patients and keeping people in those seats, which contributes to the burnout.
The folks in those administrative roles turn over really fast. It's hard to keep people in that role, because it's difficult job, and you have angry people who are waiting for weeks for a referral to come through because it's sitting on a pile of fax paper.
Mike Moore: There’s so much opportunity around automating workflows, and AI can help by ingesting data from documents and turning it into referrals and other useful outputs. AI is showing up in nearly every product being released or updated today. You mentioned Nuance and ambient documentation—Microsoft acquired Nuance a few years ago and has since enhanced the product. Even we use meeting note takers at work, whether it’s Zoom, Google, or Microsoft—they all do a good job capturing conversations.
The next step is using that captured data to trigger workflows or create tasks through agentic assistance. But from your point of view, based on your experience both in hospital environments and now with Doc Health, what’s foundational? You probably can’t just drop these tools into a healthcare organization and expect everything to work smoothly. Is there a maturity curve or progression you recommend, where customers start with the basics and grow into more sophisticated systems?
Dr. Michael Docktor: We definitely follow the crawl, walk, run approach. In healthcare, change management is the biggest challenge we face. Our biggest competitors aren’t other vendors—they’re Post-it notes, Excel files, and the belief that the EHR solves everything, which we know isn’t true.
It starts with recognizing there’s a problem. Leadership has to acknowledge that operational and administrative challenges are causing things to fall through the cracks. From there, we begin with the process. Our consultative model brings in clinical and administrative experts to help define workflows. Then, we work with the organization to map out the preferred path, identify key stakeholders, and pinpoint which systems need to be integrated.
We typically start small, targeting just a few pain points—referral management is a common one, but it could also be prescription refills, abnormal lab result follow-ups, or other clinical-administrative handoffs. The goal is to define the process clearly and deliver value quickly.
When people see automation take something that used to take 20 minutes and handle it in seconds, it builds momentum. It’s also crucial to keep humans in the loop, giving them visibility into where processes stand and ensuring they feel part of the system.
Start small. Chip away. That’s how we drive adoption and build better systems, one workflow at a time.
Mike Moore:The point you just made about keeping humans in the loop is especially important in healthcare. It's a common phrase in AI conversations, but in our industry, it carries real weight. We’ve seen high-profile cases where AI systems made decisions about claims or care without human oversight—decisions that directly impacted patients and health plan members.
That’s why we’re now seeing legislation, either passed or in progress, across different regions to ensure humans remain part of the decision-making process. And rightly so. AI can be a powerful tool, just like how ChatGPT assists with writing. In healthcare, AI-powered tools can serve as intelligent assistants for clinicians, administrators, and other staff—connecting dots that often get missed due to overload or broken processes.
What’s exciting is that these tools can surface the right information at the right time so a human can review it and confirm, “Yes, that’s what we would have done.” Then, with one click, the process moves forward. That kind of efficiency and support can be game-changing.
As a parting thought, if you were to give some advice to healthcare leaders as they think about task management and the evolution into AI and agents, what would you share with them?
Dr. Michael Docktor: First and foremost, we need to acknowledge that there’s a problem—and real opportunities for improvement. The electronic health record, while a powerful clinical tool, hasn’t solved the challenges facing administrative and operational teams. These teams want to support clinicians, but they don’t have the right tools to do it effectively.
They’ve made do with what’s available: Excel files, post-it notes, and paper checklists. But that’s not a sustainable solution.
The first step is acknowledging the gap, then working with your organization to define a preferred path forward. In our view, tasks are the fundamental building blocks of care. Those tasks make up workflows, and those workflows—when done well—represent your operational best practices.
The next step is figuring out how much of that can be automated, integrated, or even intelligently identified. That’s where AI agents come in—as digital doers that can help carry out tasks with accountability, visibility, and efficiency.
But it all starts with process. Sit down with your teams. Define what good looks like. Who’s involved? What’s the ideal flow? Then build a system that supports that path—and takes advantage of this new wave of technology that’s already transforming other industries.
Healthcare tends to adopt slowly. But the opportunity in front of us is real, and the time to act is now.
Healthcare doesn’t have a technology proble. It has a workflow problem.
Behind every delayed referral, missed follow-up, or burned-out staff member is a task that slipped through the cracks. The solution isn’t adding more dashboards or siloed tools. It’s rethinking how work gets done—from the ground up.
As Dr. Docktor makes clear, the path forward starts with better task management. Not as an afterthought, but as a core capability. When we give teams the visibility, accountability, and automation they need, we don’t just improve productivity—we reclaim time, restore trust, and refocus everyone on what really matters: delivering great care. To see how AI can facilitate smarter task management for your team, request a private demo today and explore our AI agent accelerators to see how you can start delivering immediate impact.