Primary care is being asked to do more than ever — managing chronic conditions, closing care gaps, coordinating across teams, and delivering a better patient experience, often simultaneously. But clinicians are drowning in fragmented data spread across portals, dashboards, and documentation systems, making it nearly impossible to synthesize everything needed for a single patient encounter in real time.

Prasanna Mohanty, EVP and President of Ambulatory Care at Sentara Health, argues that the solution lies in bringing intelligence directly into the clinical workflow — not as a bolt-on tool, but as a trusted, clinician-led layer that surfaces the right information at the right moment. Think patient history, care gaps, social determinants, payer rules, and clinical guidelines — all synthesized and actionable while the patient is still in the room.

Key Takeaways:

• AI must be transparent, clinically validated, and governed carefully to earn clinician trust
• Ambient clinical intelligence has already reduced documentation burden; the next step is real-time, personalized decision support
• Success requires combining people, processes, and technology — not just deploying new tools
• The goal is to reduce cognitive load so clinicians can focus their expertise where it matters most

Why it matters: As primary care evolves into a more team-based, data-intensive model, the gap between available information and actionable insight is growing. AI that's thoughtfully embedded into workflows could be the difference between a system that struggles and one that delivers consistently better, more coordinated care.