Artificial intelligence (AI) could transform healthcare by easing administrative burdens, but experts warn that if implemented poorly, it risks making doctors’ workloads even heavier. The issue took centre stage at the World Health Summit in Berlin this week, where global health leaders debated how to strengthen a strained medical workforce.
The three-day summit gathered scientists, policymakers, and healthcare professionals to explore innovative solutions for overworked medical staff. With emergency medicine and primary care doctors across the world facing long hours, mounting paperwork, and mental fatigue, many participants said that digitalisation must focus on helping doctors, not hindering them.
Axel Pries, director of the World Health Summit, criticised the growing bureaucratic pressure on hospital staff, saying many doctors feel they have drifted away from the essence of medicine. “It’s true that many doctors, but also others, feel they are no longer doing what they were trained for — to meaningfully interact with patients — but are instead feeding a huge bureaucratic juggernaut,” Pries said.
He pointed to digital systems as a cautionary tale, noting that early attempts to modernise hospitals often had the opposite effect. “One of the main reasons doctors in America have suffered from burnout over the last 20 years was the introduction of digital systems,” he said. “But that’s because those systems weren’t intelligent — they were cumbersome and demanded even more clicks, forms, and screens.”
While Pries believes that AI can play a crucial role in solving these problems, he emphasised that its effectiveness depends on data quality and context. “If AI is trained only on data from one population, such as in America, it may not work properly for people in Africa or China,” he said, highlighting the risks of bias and misrepresentation in medical algorithms.
He also raised the issue of data privacy, calling public attitudes “contradictory.” “People today willingly share personal details on social media, but are wary when hospitals or research institutions ask for data,” he said. “There’s a big difference between giving my information to Amazon or Google and sharing it with a hospital like Charité.”
A 2020 survey by the Marburger Bund medical union found that German hospital doctors spend an average of three hours per day on administrative tasks — time that could otherwise be spent with patients. About 60 percent of doctors reported that bureaucracy significantly impacts their work.
Experts at the summit agreed that for digital tools and AI to make a real difference, they must be practical, transparent, and built around doctors’ needs. Without thoughtful implementation and stronger policy support, they warned, digitalisation could deepen burnout rather than relieve it.
