My Kids Think I'm Married to My Laptop

Dr. Sarah closes her laptop at 11:47 PM. She's been home since 6:30, had dinner with her kids, helped with homework, and then opened her computer again at 9 PM. The last two and a half hours? Finishing patient notes from today's clinic in Naperville.

"I saw about 22 patients today," she tells us over coffee the following week. "That's about 8 hours of face-to-face time. But I spent nearly 11 hours on documentation and admin work." She pauses, stirring her coffee. "My kids joke that I'm married to my laptop."

The Daily Grind: Screens, Alerts, and Midnight Documentation

Sarah isn't an outlier. When we started talking to physicians across Illinois about their workdays, the same pattern emerged everywhere: for every hour with patients, they're spending nearly two hours on screens.

Dr. Michael, a family medicine physician in Peoria, pulls out his phone and shows us his calendar. "See this 45-minute block? That's how long I was on the phone with an insurance company yesterday, trying to get approval for a diabetes medication I've prescribed hundreds of times." Forty-five minutes to justify a clinical decision he made in thirty seconds.

Then there's the EHR itself. Dr. Jennifer, an internist in Champaign, pulls up her system and opens a patient chart. Pop-up alerts bloom across her screen. Drug interaction warning. Quality measure reminder. Documentation alert. Another drug interaction warning, for two medications the patient has been taking together safely for three years.

"I get about 50 of these a day," she explains, clicking through them. "Ninety-eight percent are noise. But I have to check every single one." She shows me the MIPS quality reporting fields. "I'm sitting there with Mrs. Johnson, who's telling me about her chest pain, and part of my brain is thinking: 'Did I click the smoking cessation counseling checkbox?'" She closes the chart. "I went to medical school to take care of people. Now I spend more time taking care of my computer."

And then there's "pajama time", the hours clinicians spend on EHR work after their kids go to bed. Research shows primary care doctors average 1.4 hours of this every single night. Dr. Michael's daughter asked him last week why he works at night. "I told her I was finishing my homework. She's seven. She seemed satisfied with that answer." He pauses. "I wasn't."

Nearly half of U.S. physicians show symptoms of burnout. "I know five colleagues who've left medicine in the past two years," Dr. Jennifer tells us. "Not because they stopped caring about patients. Because the system made it impossible to actually care for them."

The Problem Inside the Practice

But there's another layer to this that we didn't expect. When I start talking about AI solutions and automation, the doctors get quiet.

Dr. Sarah leans back in her chair. "Here's the thing nobody talks about," she says. "I have two medical assistants and a scribe who've been with me for years. They're the ones who help with documentation, manage my inbox, coordinate patient care. They're good people. They have families."

She looks uncomfortable. "Every vendor that comes in wants to sell me something that will 'eliminate administrative burden.' But what they really mean is: fire your staff and let our AI do their job." She shakes her head. "I can't do that. Maria has worked with me for eight years. She knows my patients by name. Her daughter just started college."

Dr. Michael jumps in. "Exactly. I've got a nurse who does prior authorizations, another who triages my patient messages, a billing specialist. Yes, I'm drowning in work. Yes, the system is broken. But the solution can't be to throw good people out of work."

Dr. Jennifer adds, "And honestly? I'm frustrated with the current systems we're using in our clinic. The patient portal is clunky, our scheduling software doesn't talk to our EHR, and my staff spends half their day just trying to find information across three different systems." She pauses. "But they've learned these systems. They've adapted. Now you want me to tell them a machine is going to do their job better?"

"What Happens to My Team?"

This is the question that kept coming up. Every doctor I spoke with was frustrated with their current systems, desperate for relief from the documentation burden, but terrified of what automation would mean for their teams.

"I looked at ambient scribing solutions last year," Dr. Sarah tells us. "The sales guy literally said, 'You won't need your scribe anymore.' He said it like it was a good thing." She looks me in the eye. "My scribe is a pre-med student. This job is helping her pay for medical school. You want me to replace her with software?"

Dr. Michael describes his practice administrator, Tom, who's been managing the chaos of their scheduling and patient communications for a decade. "Tom is the person who figures out how to make things work when the system fails. Which is constantly. You're telling me AI can do that? Maybe. But then what does Tom do?"

A Different Approach

"What if," We ask Dr. Sarah, "your medical assistant Maria could do more clinical work? What if instead of spending her day fighting with the EHR, she could focus on patient education, care coordination, the things that actually require human judgment?"]

"CruxOS will handle the documentation automatically through ambient AI. But Maria doesn't go away, she gets trained to use the system, to review and refine the AI's work, to manage the higher-level coordination that the AI surfaces. She becomes more valuable, not less."

Dr. Jennifer leans forward. "So my nurse who does prior authorizations, what happens to her?"

"We train her on the system. The AI drafts the prior auth documentation, but she reviews it, adds the clinical context that only a human would catch, manages the complex cases. She goes from data entry to clinical advocacy. And she learns skills that make her more marketable, not less."

So we’re not replacing the staff. We are giving them better tools and training them to use those tools. We're not eliminating the people.

Training, Not Replacing

Dr. Sarah asks the practical question: "How does that actually work?"

"We provide comprehensive training for your entire team," We explain. "Your medical assistants learn to work alongside the AI co-pilot, they see how it generates documentation, they learn to edit and improve it, they learn to manage the intelligent inbox that filters signal from noise. Your billing staff learns how the system optimizes coding and can focus on complex cases and payer relations instead of data entry."

"And my scribe?" she asks.

"Becomes a clinical operations specialist. Someone who understands both the clinical workflow and the technology. Someone who can train new staff, optimize the system for your specific practice patterns, and handle escalations. We train her on all of it."

Dr. Michael looks skeptical. "That's a big change. My team already feels overwhelmed."

"We know this all feels overwhelmed. That's why the training is gradual, built into the workflow, with ongoing support. And here's what we've found: your staff actually wants this. They're as burned out as you are. They didn't go into healthcare to fight with insurance companies and hunt through five systems for a lab result. They want to do meaningful work."

Making It Work in the Real Clinic

Dr. Jennifer brings up another concern. "Our current clinic systems are a mess. We've got a scheduling platform from the 90s, an EHR that crashes twice a week, a patient portal that patients hate. You're going to layer something else on top of that chaos?"

"Actually," We say, "CruxOS is designed for exactly that chaos. It's an orchestration layer that sits above all those fragmented systems and makes them work together. Your staff doesn't need to learn five different logins and interfaces anymore. They work through one intelligent interface that connects everything."

"So Maria doesn't need to check three different places to find out if a patient's labs came back?"

"Right. The system pulls it all together. She sees one unified view."

Dr. Michael adds, "And my nurse who spends two hours a day just scheduling follow-ups because our scheduling system doesn't integrate with anything?"

"The AI can handle the routine scheduling based on protocols you set. Your nurse focuses on the complex cases, the patient who needs five specialists coordinated, the one with transportation issues, the ones that need a human touch."

That's what we're building with CruxOS. Not a replacement for your team, but a transformation of how they work. We eliminate the pajama time, the alert fatigue, the prior authorization nightmare, but we do it by empowering your people, not eliminating them.

Because behind every burnout statistic is a person like Dr.Sarah, closing her laptop at midnight. And behind every one of those people is a team like Maria, Tom, and countless others who came into healthcare to help people, not to fight with computers.

They all deserve better.

Names and identifying details have been changed to protect physician privacy. CruxOS is currently in development with a comprehensive training program for clinical teams. If you're a clinician interested in learning more or participating in our pilot program, reach out to us.