Why Healthcare Research is Stuck in the Past — And What It’s Costing You
Research in healthcare drives everything from better patient outcomes to smarter funding decisions. Yet behind the breakthroughs lies a dirty secret: most research teams are drowning in admin.
Whether it’s literature reviews, clinical audits, or operational evaluations, the backbone of healthcare research today remains painfully manual. And for New Zealand’s mid-sized providers and health networks, that’s creating bottlenecks that few are talking about.
🩺 The Hidden Grind Behind Healthcare and Medical Research
Ask any clinician or health analyst about research, and you’ll hear the same pain points repeated:
• Weeks spent compiling data from EHRs, emails, SharePoint folders, and even PDFs.
• Duplication of effort, with teams manually repeating work others have already done.
• Slow, fragmented knowledge retrieval across disjointed systems.
• Highly skilled staff reduced to copy-paste work, instead of critical thinking.
Ironically, those tasked with uncovering efficiencies in healthcare often work in some of the least efficient environments imaginable.
A 2023 Health Informatics NZ survey found that over 60% of clinical research time is spent preparing rather than analyzing data.
This isn’t just frustrating—it’s expensive. Time wasted chasing down information or reformatting reports costs healthcare providers both capacity and credibility.
⚠️ Why the Status Quo Is No Longer Tenable
New Zealand’s healthcare system is under pressure. Workforce shortages, rising patient complexity, and digital fragmentation are straining every part of the system. Yet while clinical workflows slowly modernize, research workflows remain stuck in email chains and Excel hell.
If you’re a mid-sized DHB, private provider, or PHO, this hits especially hard. You don’t have armies of analysts or IT specialists. But your clinicians are still expected to contribute to evidence-based practice, publish insights, or support continuous improvement initiatives.
This creates a dangerous productivity gap—where vital research is delayed or dropped simply because no one has the time to sift through mountains of unstructured data.
⏳ The Cost of Tedious Research Work
Let’s put a number on it. If a research lead spends 20 hours a week on information prep—searching, reformatting, collating—and their time is worth $90/hour, that’s over $93,000 per year per analyst going into busywork. Multiply that across teams, and the cost balloons quickly.
But the bigger loss is opportunity cost:
• Studies that don’t get published.
• Audits that are late to the board.
• Process improvements that never get identified.
And perhaps most importantly, the burnout of your smartest staff as they spend more time fighting admin than generating insights.
🧠 Imagine If Research Was Actually About Research
What if your analysts, registrars, and clinicians could instantly access structured knowledge from across your organisation—without trawling through PDFs?
What if they could generate first-draft reports, summarise findings, or identify trends using natural language queries?
What if “doing a literature scan” took minutes, not weeks?
The technology to unlock that kind of efficiency exists. But first, healthcare leaders need to acknowledge the elephant in the room: research workflows are broken—and it’s time to fix them.
