In my role as a subspecialist physician, I’ve worked in diverse settings—from independent outpatient practices to academic centers and hospital systems. Each environment presents unique challenges, but one issue remains consistent: poor data.
In outpatient settings, the problem is often too little data. Physicians frequently lack critical patient information, forcing nurses, staff, and even trainees to waste valuable time chasing records through phone calls, faxes, or manual chart reviews in order to answer basic questions like: Where did this patient come from? Who referred them? Why are they here?
In academic or hospital settings, the challenge flips to too much data. Providers can spend hours sifting through nursing notes, consults, labs, and repetitive summaries to form a mental picture of a complex case before even stepping into the patient’s room.
This is the reality of today’s healthcare data problem. With the rise of AI, the most transformative opportunity isn’t the often-hyped AI-assisted diagnosis. The biggest opportunity lies in automating all of the laborious, manual tasks that must happen even before the doctor, and before diagnosis and treatment. At the top of that list is ensuring the right patient information is available, at the right time, and in the right format.
Predoc, a clinician-founded company, is tackling this challenge with AI-powered record retrieval and analysis.
The Data Paradox in Healthcare
Today’s healthcare system is drowning in data. According to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, 96% of U.S. hospitals and nearly 80% of office-based physicians use certified EHRs (ONC, 2021). A Stanford Medicine report estimates healthcare data grows at 48% annually, with the average hospital producing 50 petabytes yearly—97% of which goes unused (Stanford Medicine Health Trends Report, 2018; Stat News).
In theory, this data abundance should simplify understanding patient health. In reality, it’s the root of the problem. Patients are often burdened with collecting and couriering their own records, essentially becoming “professional patients.” Meanwhile, physicians and staff face long wait times and administrative bottlenecks to access records from prior providers, often relying on outdated tools like e-fax or email. To complete this vicious cycle, staff at these offices are overwhelmed by responding to these same requests from outside parties, leading many to outsource or offshore this return of information function entirely. The administrative costs of Health Information Management in the United States totals over $20B in annual payroll spend, with forecasted growth in Health Information Management roles over the next 10 years (US Bureau of Labor Statistics).
The consequences? Delays in care, frustrated patients, physician burnout, approximately $10 billion in annual administrative payroll expenses for health information management tasks, and—more often than we’d like to admit—substandard care due to incomplete health information.
Predoc’s Impact: A Case Study
A leading value-based oncology network operating 70+ locations, across four states, faced a common challenge, oncologists urgently need previous records, labs, pathology, imaging, and molecular diagnostic reports on new referrals to formulate a safe, evidence-based treatment plan. This urgency traditionally requires slow and expensive in-house admin teams tasked with manually requesting, interpreting, and synthesizing hundreds of pages of records per patient. By leveraging Predoc’s AI-powered platform the results were transformative:
Shorter wait times: Patient record retrieval time dropped from weeks to hours or days, reducing care delays and time-to-first-visit.
Reduced strain: Time spent on chart review for care coordinators and providers decreased by over 75% with Predoc’s customizable clinical summaries. “I’ve never seen anything that matches the quality of Predoc” noted a senior operations team member.
Lower Costs: Relying on Predoc for chart chase and chart prep saved the network over 50% in administrative costs, offloading the entire medical record retrieval and analysis workflow. These cost savings were realized alongside faster, more complete record retrievals, improving the quality of patient care at first visit.
Why Act Now?
With physician burnout at record levels, patient expectations rising, and AI now capable of automating these tasks, the time to address health information management challenges is now. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is actively advancing its Health Tech Ecosystem Initiative, launched to accelerate interoperable health IT solutions and streamline data exchange across providers (CMS, 2025). This initiative underscores the urgency for healthcare organizations to adopt innovative technologies like AI to enhance care coordination and reduce administrative burdens. Predoc’s AI-driven approach streamlines record management, empowering providers to focus on what matters most: delivering exceptional care.
Ready to give your providers more time to practice medicine and free your coordinators from the fax machine? Learn how Predoc can help your organization reimagine health information management at Predoc’s website.
The post Predoc is Redefining Health Information Management with Artificial Intelligence appeared first on Becker’s Hospital Review | Healthcare News & Analysis.
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