Title: Reclaiming the Break: A Doctor’s Insight on Technology, Reflection, and the Future of Health Care
Author: Salim Afshar, MD – Medical Executive
In the swiftly digitizing landscape of health care, traversing an expo floor brimming with cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) innovations can resemble a fusion of a tech fair and a Blade Runner-esque marketplace. Vendors showcase AI solutions designed to craft clinical notes, streamline scheduling, and enhance workflows—all pledging to “transform” health care. However, amidst this excitement, numerous clinicians ponder: Where are we truly going?
The Uplift of Technology—and the Diminution of Reflection
While technology offers the promise of efficiency, convenience, and improved patient results, these advantages have exacted a toll: the decline of thoughtful, reflective medical practice. Gradually, the esteemed calling of medicine has been overtaken by clicks, checklists, and an incessantly growing flood of administrative duties. In our pursuit of productivity, we have cultivated a culture that frequently equates constant activity with purpose and multitasking with effectiveness.
However, the human mind was designed for depth, not perpetual distraction.
As health care providers, we have gradually adjusted to the barrage. Like high-efficiency machines, we navigate through notification overload and overcrowded agendas. Yet beneath this stoic exterior, physicians and nurses are feeling burnout and what is increasingly termed “moral injury”—the gradual internal decline stemming from the knowledge of how to deliver quality care while being systematically hindered from achieving it.
More Efficiency, Less Empathy?
Although many attribute the disconnection to artificial intelligence or digital tools, the true issue may lie within our shared mindset. Technology is only as beneficial—or as disruptive—as the surrounding culture. What is genuinely fading in contemporary medicine is the skill of deep thinking, the practice of wondering aloud, and the opportunity to pose challenging questions among colleagues.
Being a practitioner used to involve grappling with complexity and nuance, thoughtfully deliberating diagnoses, and exchanging hypotheses in break rooms, lounges, and hospital libraries. These spontaneous moments of contemplation—once fertile ground for innovation—have mostly vanished.
Data supports this. Nurses now allocate only 31% of their time for direct patient interaction, and health care systems lose over $12 billion each year due to miscoordination. Administrative pressures heavily burden clinical teams, negatively affecting job satisfaction and ultimately hindering patient care.
The Vanishing “Smoke Break”
Interestingly, one surprising casualty of this cultural evolution was something as seemingly trivial as the smoke break. Although no one advocates returning to smoking, consider what those breaks used to represent: an impromptu gathering, a pause, an exchange of ideas.
Whether gathered outside hospital entrances or in smoky lounges, those moments served as cornerstones of camaraderie and innovation. They promoted informal learning, human connection, and even advancements in medicine.
Today, with vending machines replaced by wellness webinars and lounges substituted with remote workspaces, those spontaneous moments of inspiration have been mechanized—and in some cases, lost completely.
So, What Do We Preserve?
AI should certainly handle repetitive, error-prone, or predictive tasks—activities that humans struggle with or shouldn’t have to undertake. Automating note-taking, flagging discrepancies, and forecasting patient declines could be groundbreaking. But the pressing question remains: What do we do with the time that is meant to be liberated?
Gains in efficiency should be reinvested into carving out time for what technology cannot replicate—meaningful dialogue, personal reflection, and critical analysis. Their absence diminishes the essence of medicine. An exceptional scheduling system will never replace the strength of genuine conversations between colleagues where new concepts are born and evaluated.
Reclaiming Culture in a Tech-Driven Era
The promising news? Awareness of this challenge is growing among health care leaders. Organizations are starting to establish spaces—both physical and metaphorical—for discussion, thought, and reconnection. The American Medical Association, among others, is dedicated to empowering physicians and clinicians to influence future developments.
The path forward does not lie in doing more yoga or hosting another “cookie day” (though both are charming). What the health care sector truly seeks is deliberate time to think deeply, wonder aloud, and engage in authentic dialogue—not merely regarding the next shift, but about the future of medicine itself.
Restoring the Significant Moments
Doctors and nurses do not need to reconnect with nicotine. However, we must reclaim the metaphorical “smoke break”—a pause within the turmoil, a chance to reflect, to pose challenging questions, and to cultivate connections that no application can replicate.
Because if we forfeit that, we risk becoming what we strive to avoid: exceptionally efficient, impeccably organized—and deeply inhuman.
With awareness emerging and voices beginning to rise, perhaps it’s not too late to revive the lost art of contemplation in medicine.
About the Author:
Salim