“Clinicians and staff are overwhelmed by clicks, by information that's fragmented, the need to move between multiple systems, honestly, just to do their job.”
That observation from Ranga Bodla, vice president of field and industry marketing at Oracle NetSuite, captures a frustration that extends well beyond any single organization. Across healthcare, leaders face workforce shortages, rising costs, reimbursement pressure, and growing expectations from patients. Yet many of those challenges are compounded by something far more mundane: staff spending hours navigating systems, searching for information, and managing workflows that have become increasingly complex over time.
During a conversation with Daniel Williams, senior editor and host of the MGMA Insights Podcast, Bodla discussed the themes he and Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, will explore during their MGMA Annual Conference keynote, From Burden to Bandwidth. While artificial intelligence remains central to the discussion, the conversation repeatedly returned to a more immediate issue for healthcare organizations: the growing amount of administrative work embedded in everyday operations.
Administrative Work Has Become a Capacity Problem
“When I talk to healthcare leaders right now, they're under tremendous pressure,” Bodla said. “They're trying to improve patient care. All of us wanna be healthier, but they've also got the workforce shortages. There's rising costs. There's increasing administrative complexity.”
Those pressures often surface in routine tasks that rarely make headlines. Teams spend time searching across systems for information, reconciling reports from different platforms, tracking down missing data, and completing manual processes that have accumulated over years of technology purchases and operational changes. What might seem like minor inefficiencies in isolation can add up to a significant drain on organizational capacity.
According to Bodla, healthcare leaders are describing the same experience regardless of organizational size or specialty. “Clinicians and staff are overwhelmed by clicks, by information that's fragmented, the need to move between multiple systems, honestly, just to do their job.”
MGMA data illustrates how those administrative demands translate into staffing challenges. In MGMA's Annual Regulatory Burden Report, 92% of surveyed medical groups reported hiring or reassigning staff solely to manage prior authorization requests, while 60% said at least three employees are typically involved in completing a single authorization request. Those resources could otherwise support patient access, clinical operations, or strategic growth initiatives.
For Bodla, that reality explains why healthcare leaders are increasingly focused on simplification. “What I hear is they want technology that simplifies their work, reduces that administrative burden, and ultimately gives them time back so they can spend it with patients instead of with systems.”
Looking at Both Sides of the Organization
The upcoming keynote brings together clinical and operational perspectives on the same challenge.
“Seema, she's gonna focus on clinical experience and how technology can improve care delivery,” Bodla said. “From my side, I'm gonna really focus on the operational side of the business, how the connective systems and AI can simplify the work across finance, HR, supply chain operations.”
That operational lens often gets less attention than clinical applications, but it affects nearly every aspect of a healthcare organization. Finance teams rely on timely reporting and forecasting. HR departments manage recruitment, retention, and staffing pressures. Supply chain leaders are expected to improve efficiency while controlling costs. In many organizations, those functions operate in separate systems, creating friction whenever information needs to move from one department to another.
“Together we're really gonna explore how if we can reduce administrative complexity it ultimately will help create more capacity and allow clinicians and staff to focus on the work that matters most.”
What Bandwidth Looks Like in Practice
For many healthcare leaders, bandwidth is shorthand for staffing levels or available time on the schedule. Bodla uses the term more broadly.
“It's about reducing that administrative burden that gets in the way of delivering care,” he said. “Too many clinicians and staff are overwhelmed by these clicks and disconnected systems and manual processes.”
Reducing that burden can take many forms. It may mean automating routine tasks, eliminating duplicate work, improving visibility across departments, or delivering information in a way that reduces the need to move among applications. The common thread is that staff spend less time managing systems and more time acting on information.
To illustrate the point, Bodla pointed to Nor-Lea Hospital District, a nonprofit community-based healthcare system in New Mexico that uses NetSuite. “I love the quote that they have,” he said. “With NetSuite, their team can do twice the amount of work with less effort on their part.”
That example stood out because it reframes a familiar productivity discussion. “It can't just be do more with less,” Bodla said. “If they can get more with less work, that's really about reducing burden and increasing bandwidth.”
Finding Opportunities in Repetitive Work
When the discussion turned to AI, Bodla focused less on future possibilities and more on today's operational challenges.
“Probably the biggest thing is there's a lot of repetitive work that slows organizations down,” he said.
Finance departments provide one example. Activities such as reconciliations, reporting, and exception management have traditionally required significant manual effort. Bodla said many organizations are using AI to streamline those workflows and surface the information that requires attention.
“We're seeing finance teams, they're using AI to automate reconciliations, to streamline the reporting, improve some of the forecasting, and also frankly to surface some of those exceptions so that they don't have to spend hours searching through reports.”
The same principle applies to clinical environments, particularly when it comes to documentation. “In healthcare, Oracle Health, they're using AI to reduce documentation and administrative work so the clinicians themselves can actually spend more time with patients.”
Throughout the conversation, Bodla returned to a simple test for evaluating new technology: “How can AI help people spend less time managing process and more time making decisions?”
Why Adoption Depends on Workflow
Technology projects often succeed or fail based on workforce adoption. During the conversation, Daniel Williams raised a concern many healthcare leaders know well: employees see a new application and immediately wonder how much additional work will be required to learn it. Bodla didn't dispute the concern. “People don't want yet another application to manage.”
The comment reflects years of accumulated technology decisions throughout healthcare. Organizations have added portals, reporting tools, communication platforms, revenue cycle software, and specialized applications. Even helpful tools can become burdensome when they require separate workflows, new training, or additional logins. As a result, the most effective technology may be the technology users hardly notice.
“The best AI is embedded directly into the applications and the workflows that people already use every day,” Bodla said. “If AI works properly, it should feel like a natural extension of how you're already working.”
The goal is not to create another destination for employees. It's to simplify existing work. “It allows you to get to your end goal faster, easier.”
Documentation Remains a Natural Starting Point
When discussing leaders who remain cautious about AI, Bodla pointed to one area where interest remains consistently strong: clinical documentation.“We've heard consistently from clinicians that documentation and administrative work and navigating those multiple systems takes time away from patient care.”
That concern helps explain why ambient listening technologies and documentation tools have drawn so much attention across healthcare. As an example, Bodla highlighted Oracle Health's clinical AI tools. “The Oracle Health Clinical AI Agent, it's embedded directly into the clinician's workflow so they can use that ambient listening and AI to help automate documentation.”
The example reflects a theme that surfaced throughout the conversation: technology should fit naturally into the work people are already doing.
“We wanna take AI and fit it naturally in existing workflows and then reduce the administrative burden rather than adding to it.”
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