At this year’s Workato’s WOW Conference, I opened with a simple question. What if life was your most important return on investment. In healthcare, that is not just a metaphor. Time equals life. Every hour we can give back to a physician, a nurse, or an IT teammate can translate into better care, better coaching, and better outcomes.

The data backs up the opportunity. Asana’s research shows people spend roughly half their day on busywork. In acute care we see a similar pattern. In our own study at Vituity, ER physicians spend only about forty percent of their time with patients. The rest gets eaten by documentation, coordination, and systems that were never designed for the pace of modern care. That is the gap AI can close when paired with the right orchestration.

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Who we are and why it matters

Vituity is a physician owned, physician led partnership with more than seven thousand clinicians across over six hundred ninety practice locations. We started fifty years ago with a mission to improve outcomes and save lives. That mission has scaled, but it has not changed. As Senior Vice President of Technology Services at Vituity, my job is to fuel that just cause with technology, security, and operations that give people time back.

Success without superheroes

We tried to fix complexity with process alone. It did not stick. The breakthrough was a simple model that anyone can copy.

• For me. Give individuals the tools and permission to build. No one waits for a committee to experiment. Work in a sandbox. Prove value fast.
• For the team. When others raise their hands to use it, harden the solution. Add the right controls, data pathways, and support.
• For the company. When multiple teams rely on it, graduate it to an enterprise service with governance and scale.

This is success without superheroes. The binder beats the cape. Convention over configuration creates a paved road that meets needs, feels bespoke, and anticipates what comes next.

A concrete win: Coaching Conversations

One of the most tangible examples of this model in action came from our partnership between IT and HR. Our Director of Automation, Ritika Singh, leads the team at Vituity that builds on Workato. Her group focuses on practical innovation, finding the tedious, time-consuming tasks that weigh people down and reimagining them with automation.

Together, Ritika’s team and HR tackled something every manager dreads: midyear and annual reviews. The result was a Coaching Conversations assistant that completely rethought the process.

What it does:

• Schedules the meeting in Outlook and lands it on both calendars with the right agenda and context.
• Preps both sides with a friendly nudge and clear prompts.
• Joins the call via Teams, then steps out. It records and transcribes with privacy and controls that satisfy our HITRUST and HIPAA discipline.
• Generates an accurate, editable summary that drops into the HRIS.

Why it worked:

• Time savings. Drafts that used to take thirty to sixty minutes per person now take about two minutes to produce and five to polish.
• Viral adoption. We aimed for five percent. We hit that, then word of mouth carried it to about twenty percent during a micro pilot.
• Energy. Once people felt the paved road, six more business units asked for variations. Work that once looked infeasible became a copy and adapt exercise.

Estimated impact in the pilot was about twelve hundred hours returned to the business. The number matters less than the feeling. When the bot was down for a day, managers panicked. That is what product market fit feels like inside an enterprise.

Scaling the model

Coaching Conversations was only the start. Once people experienced what automation could feel like, other teams quickly raised their hands. Within weeks, six more business units came forward with their own ideas, everything from resident training programs to compliance checklists.

This is the real power of the for me, for the team, for the company model. A single pilot proved the value, and then momentum built bottom up. Teams didn’t need a superhero solution. They needed paved roads they could trust, repeat, and expand.

Why Workato

We use workato at three layers that mach this model.

• Recipes and Workbot for me. Clickable, fast paths that show the art of the possible and save time on day one.
• Genies for the team. Natural language control that delights people and drives participation. “Schedule all my reviews this week” becomes a single instruction.
• Workato Go for the company. One digital front door, backed by enterprise search. Instead of seventy separate front doors, people ask, “What do I need to do this week” and Go brings the work to them. Role based access, governance, and the ability to act across systems make the long tail of tasks finally reachable.

We are also using this foundation to consolidate platforms. Administrators will always live in their native tools. Everyone else gets a simpler way in.

Guardrails that build trust

AI at work requires trust. We run on Azure OpenAI through Microsoft to meet HIPAA expectations. We put every service through our HITRUST controls with preventive, detective, and corrective measures. The goal is not security theater. The goal is patient safety, privacy, and reliable operations that keep humans in the loop.

The flywheel

Bottom up innovation produced a small win. That win showed us a better way to pave the road. We applied the same conventions to operations. The ninety percent beast of day to day work started to look like the same manageable building blocks we used in the pilot. That is the flywheel. Innovation feeding operations, operations feeding more innovation.

Closing thought

If time is the ultimate ROI, then the right mix of orchestration, guardrails, and bottom up momentum is how you compound it. The result is not fewer people. It is more care, more coaching, and more life in the hours we already have.