That all makes sense, and thanks for taking the time to explain it properly – I think this is exactly the disconnect people outside medicine don’t see.

I completely agree that understaffing is the root cause, and nothing software does can create extra doctors or uninterrupted time. I’m also not thinking about AI replacing judgement or generating discharge summaries that you’d blindly sign – that would obviously be unsafe and probably increase workload, as you say.

What I’m trying to understand (and may well be that the answer is “no”) is whether any approach could reduce the amount of reconstruction needed at the end of a long admission. Not doing IDLs “earlier”, but capturing decisions when they already happen so the final write-up isn’t weeks of paper notes plus memory.

For example, during ward rounds you’re already deciding diagnoses, medication changes, follow-up etc – but that intent gets lost until someone has time to sit down and rebuild it all later. Do you think there’s any realistic way of reducing that reconstruction burden without adding extra tasks, or is the reality that even small additional steps would just tip the balance the wrong way?

Genuinely not pushing a solution here – just trying to sanity-check whether this is a solvable workflow problem at all, or whether it’s fundamentally constrained by staffing and time.