Much of the conversation surrounding healthcare inefficiency focuses on familiar targets. Electronic health records, prior authorizations, documentation requirements, and administrative burden all receive substantial attention, and for good reason.
These obstacles consume time, contribute to burnout, and frequently interfere with patient care.
Yet there is another source of inefficiency that receives comparatively little discussion despite being encountered by clinicians every day: clinical information friction.
Most physicians immediately recognize the phenomenon, even if they have never heard the term. A clinical question arises during patient care. The answer almost certainly exists somewhere. It may be contained within a guideline, a review article, a society recommendation, a drug database, or a clinical calculator.
The challenge is rarely the absence of information. The challenge is locating the correct information, confirming that it is current, and applying it quickly enough to influence a clinical decision.
Modern medicine has largely solved the problem of information access. The contemporary clinician has access to an unprecedented volume of medical knowledge. Clinical guidelines, primary literature, specialty society recommendations, drug references, calculators, and decision support tools are available within seconds.
In theory, this abundance of information should make clinical decision making easier than ever before.
In practice, however, abundance often creates its own challenges.
The volume of medical knowledge continues to expand at a pace that far exceeds any individual's ability to memorize or continuously maintain mastery over every relevant recommendation.
Every year introduces new medications, updated guidelines, revised diagnostic criteria, emerging safety data, and additional clinical trials. These developments represent genuine progress, but they also increase complexity.
As medicine becomes more evidence based, it simultaneously becomes more difficult to navigate.
This creates a subtle but important distinction. Access to information is not the same as access to usable information.
The Experience of Clinical Information Friction
Most clinicians have experienced the process.
A question arises during a patient encounter. One resource is opened, followed by another. A guideline provides partial clarification but leaves a specific issue unanswered. A calculator is needed. A drug database must be consulted. A recommendation requires verification against another source.
Five minutes later the answer is finally obtained.
Individually, these steps appear trivial. Collectively, they occur dozens of times throughout a typical week and often multiple times during a single shift. The result is a form of friction that gradually accumulates throughout the clinical workflow.
The Cost Extends Beyond Time
The cost of that friction extends beyond the time required to locate information. Every search introduces an interruption. Every additional resource demands attention. Every context switch requires cognitive effort. Physicians rarely make decisions in isolation.
Clinical questions arise while simultaneously managing documentation, patient flow, family discussions, phone calls, pages, staffing challenges, and competing clinical priorities. Under these circumstances, even small inefficiencies become meaningful.
The Paradox of Evidence-Based Medicine
This reality presents an interesting paradox. Evidence-based medicine has been one of the most important developments in modern healthcare. It has improved outcomes, standardized care, reduced variation, and elevated the overall quality of medical practice. Yet the success of evidence-based medicine has also produced an unintended consequence: the body of evidence has become so large that navigating it efficiently has become a challenge in its own right.
The problem facing modern clinicians is therefore not a lack of information. It is the growing distance between a clinical question and a clinically actionable answer.
Implications for Healthcare Technology
This distinction has important implications for the future of healthcare technology. Discussions about technology in medicine often focus on generating more information. More alerts, more dashboards, more notifications, more analytics, and more data are frequently presented as solutions to clinical challenges.
However, clinicians are already surrounded by information. The greater opportunity may lie in reducing the effort required to access, interpret, and apply the information that already exists.
The most valuable clinical decision support tools are unlikely to be those that generate the greatest volume of information. They are more likely to be the tools that reduce unnecessary friction, minimize context switching, streamline access to evidence, and allow clinicians to move more efficiently from question to answer.
At its core, this is not a problem of knowledge. It is a problem of retrieval. Modern clinicians do not struggle because information is unavailable. They struggle because finding the right information at the right moment often requires more effort than it should.
That observation was one of the ideas that inspired the development of DUK-C. The goal is not to replace physician judgment, nor is it to create additional information. The goal is to make existing information more accessible, more actionable, and easier to integrate into clinical workflow.
The Path Forward
Medicine has never possessed more knowledge than it does today. The challenge now is ensuring that knowledge can be accessed quickly enough to improve patient care. Reducing clinical information friction may ultimately prove just as important as generating new information in the first place.
Join Early Access
If you have ever found yourself opening multiple guidelines, references, calculators, and databases to answer a single clinical question, you already understand the problem.
DUK-C is being built to reduce that friction and make evidence-based decision making faster and more accessible at the point of care.
Join early access at dukc.app.
Related Reading: