4 Ways That AI Could Transform Healthcare Roles

When LinkedIn published its Future of Work report last fall, it found that healthcare was among the least likely, out of 18 industries, to see major job disruptions from generative AI. 

Nurses and doctors, after all, rely on the human touch and more than a dose of empathy to do their job well. But even their jobs stand to be wildly transformed. AI is increasingly being used in healthcare for everything from recording and transcribing conversations between a doctor and patient to helping oncologists identify subtle differences between tumors. 

SXSW recently hosted a panel, Will AI Replace Healthcare Workers? No, But It Will Turn Them into Tech Workers, to look at how healthcare roles are being transformed. The panel, moderated by Claudia Lucchinetti, dean of the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin, included Sunita Mishra, chief medical officer at Amazon; Jim Swanson, executive vice president and enterprise chief information officer at Johnson & Johnson; and Aneesh Raman, head of the Opportunity Project at LinkedIn.

Here’s what they had to say about the rapidly changing field of healthcare. 

1. Healthcare jobs are hot right now, even as roles change 

When LinkedIn published its list of most in-demand jobs earlier this year, it found that six of the top 10 roles with the fastest-growing demand were in healthcare. These included “care specialist,” “surgical technician,” “medical surgical nurse” and “progressive care nurse.” The field is so hot that two nurses apply for a job every minute in the U.S. on LinkedIn. 

As AI reshapes healthcare, new jobs are also being created. Healthcare companies increasingly need workers to fill roles such as machine learning researchers/engineers, data scientists, and computational biologists. 

To put this into perspective, Aneesh pointed to a MIT study in which researchers found that 60% of the jobs in 2018 did not exist in 1940. “Every time we have a new technological change, disruptions come first,” Aneesh told the SXSW audience. “As humans, our brains are wired to be fearful and to be anxious over survival. But for most of us — healthcare included — jobs are going to change and new categories of jobs are going to emerge.”  

2. Healthcare providers, like all of the workforce, need to upskill

LinkedIn research also found that the skills healthcare providers need to do their jobs has changed by 28% since 2015, a number that is expected to increase to 68% for jobs across industries by 2030. 

Aneesh said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella calls this the era of the learn-it-all. “It’s all about the ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn,” Aneesh said, “and I think healthcare will lead the way.” (To help with that, LinkedIn has unlocked its five most popular AI courses for healthcare professionals and one bonus course until July 1, 2024.)

Jim agreed with Aneesh, adding that learning is a huge priority at Johnson & Johnson. The company hosts a J&J Learn Day every year, inviting all 130,000 employees to spend the day brushing up on or learning new skills. J&J also offers six-week digital immersion boot camps, which include 90 minutes of instruction every week on topics such as intelligent automation, data science, and data engineering.  

The company encourages competition between divisions — such as its innovative medicine and medtech segments as well as corporate functions like HR and finance — to see who is learning fastest and acquiring the most skills. They also encourage employees to become “bilingual”; that is, conversant in both their roles and the language of technology. They do all this for a good reason: Lives are on the line. Equipped with the right skills, Jim explained, J&J employees can help improve patient care. They can drive better outcomes for surgeries. They can help bring novel therapies for cancer to market.

“Our mission at J&J is to transform healthcare,” he said, “not incrementally improve it.”

3. Healthcare providers will transform technology at the same time AI transforms healthcare

It’s not just that AI is transforming healthcare, however. Healthcare providers are also transforming AI. That’s particularly true at Amazon, whose One Medical division created hybrid “product/clinician” roles. 

“In these roles, part of the clinician’s time is spent in the clinic seeing patients,” Sunita explained, “but the other part is spent embedded in the product team, where they can share insights and work upstream to make sure we’re building products with the right human characteristics and the capabilities to solve real problems that they’re seeing.” 

Amazon has also developed a series of learning modules called Catalyst, in which healthcare experts speak to the technology team, to help them better understand what constitutes primary care, women’s healthcare, and mental health — highlighting opportunities for a better customer and provider experience. 

Bringing these two teams together “is really sparking some interesting conversations for the tech folks,” Sunita said. “It’s been exciting to see the things they’re thinking about being applied in a setting where you can actually see it changing human lives.”

4. AI could ease burnout among doctors, nurses, and other providers

One of the most urgent issues in the healthcare world right now is burnout. Claudia pointed to a study that said that the U.S. could face a shortage of 139,000 physicians by 2033, which is partly due to demographic trends but also very much due to burnout. Particularly during the pandemic, doctors and nurses had to carry such heavy workloads that many simply left the field altogether. 

Part of the challenge, Sunita said, is that physicians’ days are filled with busy work that often keeps them from doing what they really love, which is caring for patients. “Now in a clinician’s day, filling out ‘prior authorization’ forms has the same weight,” she said, “as actually talking to a patient to let them know they’ve got a diagnosis of cancer.” She added that if AI can start to automate some of the busy work, physicians will have the opportunity to spend more time with people. “That,” she said, “is where the real transformation is going to happen.”

Final thoughts: AI could free up time to innovate 

Healthcare has always been at the forefront of innovation. But innovation requires time. And most physicians and nurses are so busy right now that they struggle to find time for lunch, let alone a moment to contemplate. 

AI could change that. “You’re now going to have an economy fueled by human ideas and human creativity that is going to require human productivity at work to be about time to think, to collaborate, and time to innovate,” Aneesh said. “These are the things that burnout undermines. So in the same way that you wouldn’t let your data center overheat and be casual about it, I think human energy is going to be much more of a deliberate focus for workplaces.”