“An optimal decision that nobody adopts is actually worth exactly zero minutes.”
Resoundingly Human · September 2026
Context
The host had asked ChatGPT which decision in a patient's journey it would redesign and read the answer back to her; Orfanoudaki agreed with it, then said it described the destination without describing the difficulty. She had just finished walking through a before-and-after trial of a vertical-care pathway at Mayo Clinic Arizona. The line is her constraint on the whole field: a protocol has to be usable mid-shift, without new software, by a clinician who trusts it enough to actually follow it.
Transcript
…of the Central Mayo Clinic called halfway through the implementation trial and said, Well, we noticed that your guys are going faster. Can you tell us what's going on? Because we are seeing an improvement and we don't know where this is coming because we haven't invested more money into the clinic.
…determining what type of care environment a patient actually needs rather than automatically treating an emergency department bed as the default destination. So what do you think? How did AI do? And based on what you've learned through your research, is there anything you would add or change?
…you're creating a disruption between who gets allocated the bed and who doesn't. So I would say this is one of the core questions that matters. The other thing I would add is the constraint that the answer requires. Like you need a design that has to be usable by a clinician with shift without the screen, without necessarily new software, and it has to be something they trust enough to follow. An optimal decision that nobody adopts is actually worth exactly zero minutes. So having worked in healthcare for multiple years now, that has become a big component of how I think about research and how I think about kind of not only the modeling part, but how do we translate that in practice?
So back to something we discussed a little bit earlier. An 11 minute reduction in an emergency room visit time might sound relatively modest, but when you multiply that across thousands of patients, I imagine it becomes pretty significant. What does an 11 minute improvement actually mean…
And that's an excellent point. And, you know, kind of when I first saw the result, briefly, I thought of the same thing. But let me actually do the calculation with you. So for a medium-sized department, seeing about 40,000 patients a year, right, an 11-minute reduction per visit adds up to roughly…
So I think there's a larger idea here that I really love and I think it's kind of been the theme of our conversation today that sometimes innovation isn't about adding more resources or more technology. It's making better decisions with what you already have. What do you hope healthcare leaders and…