Insurance Accepting

On October 16, 2025, the Primary Care Collaborative (PCC) gathered health technology leaders for a pivotal discussion on leveraging emerging technologies and new tools to reduce the administrative burden plaguing primary care. This discussion, the second in a vital 2025 series on value-based care burdens, featured our own Dr. Sara Pastoor, MD, MHA, Head of Primary Care Advancement at Elation Health, alongside experts from Navina, Atlantic Health, and Innovaccer.

The consensus was clear: cluttered workflows and fragmented data are toxic to primary care, driving high rates of burnout and preventing practices from fully realizing the potential of value-based care.

The EHR as the Clinician's "Living Room"

Dr. Pastoor framed the conversation by describing the Electronic Health Record (EHR) as a clinician's "living room"—the space where we spend the majority of our professional lives. The core problem is that this space is often designed to work against the clinician, requiring endless "toil".

She argued that the EHR’s design must evolve to prioritize the clinician's cognitive resources for actual patient care:

• Non-Clinical Tasks Must Be Invisible: Non-clinical tasks, like coding, should be handled invisibly by technical design, not by human effort.

• Cognitive Burden Must Be Streamlined: Mentally draining work, such as chart review, complex inbox management, and care coordination, must be streamlined to minimize clicks and maximize an effortless, intuitive experience.

This clinical-first approach to EHR design is at the heart of Elation’s mission, where a focus on the user experience has been proven to significantly reduce administrative burden and burnout for providers.

The Tech & Policy Levers for Change

Panelists identified two major areas where immediate change is needed: data flow and governance.

Data Flow & Standardization

• Data Janitorial Work: Lisa Bari (Innovaccer) highlighted the importance of a "data janitorial" layer to standardize information across disparate records, making it usable and actionable for clinicians.

• Actionable Insights: Dr. Yair Lewis (Navina) described their "physician co-pilot," which aggregates clinical, claims, and Health Information Exchange (HIE) data to summarize histories and provide actionable, AI-based insights directly into the workflow.

• End Information Blocking: All three panelists called for stronger enforcement and clearer guidance on information blocking rules to ensure data flows freely and safely between all necessary stakeholders.

AI Governance & Trust

The conversation turned to the rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the challenges of governing a technology that evolves daily.

• Need for Coherent Standards: Dr. Pastoor urged the need for national consistency so clinicians can reliably share data without legal ambiguity. She advocated for harmonized annual federal standards centered on safety, privacy, accuracy, usefulness, and clarity, aligned with frameworks like NIST.

• Protecting Small Practices: Recognizing that small practices and FQHCs often lack the technical vetting capacity and can be overwhelmed by "vaporware" solutions, Dr. Pastoor championed the concept of AI-native EHRs. This approach bakes essential tools directly into a single platform, reducing the fragmentation and sunk cost associated with managing multiple disparate vendor solutions.

• The Liability Question: A major unresolved policy gap flagged by Lisa Bari is the unclear liability when harm occurs despite having a "human in the loop," a reality that must be resolved before greater reliance on AI is adopted.

The Vision for a 2030 Primary Care Team

Looking five years ahead, the panelists painted a generally hopeful picture of the future.

Dr. Lewis predicted that agentic AI will become the routine first point of contact for simple primary care interactions. Dr. Pastoor envisioned the most profound shift: the clinician moving from data entry to a trusted interpreter and coach. With AI handling the data processing and surfacing insights, the primary care team will be empowered to deliver proactive, coordinated, population-level care that fully integrates social needs into the care plan.

A Call to Action

The session closed with a clear message: better technology and better data are required to power the future of primary care. The ultimate goal is to remove the "hidden tax" of administration, allowing clinicians to focus on building stronger, more human relationships with their patients and delivering the high-quality care that is essential to national health.

To learn more about how Elation is championing primary care advancement and building AI-native tools to reduce administrative burden, explore our EHR.