Health systems are adding chief AI officers, AI governance committees and machine learning teams. At the same time, a set of older IT jobs is winding down, as cloud and enterprise platforms take hold alongside AI. Those fading roles tend to share a profile: maintaining on-site hardware, working through support tickets or writing custom code that doesn’t scale.
At Evanston, Ill.-based Endeavor Health, CIO Deb Anderson said in April that roles centered on on-premises infrastructure, ticket-based support and custom development that doesn’t scale are being phased out.
“We are replacing them with capabilities in cloud, enterprise platforms, data, AI and cybersecurity, while elevating roles that connect technology directly to care delivery, including product leaders, clinical informaticists and IT business partners,” Ms. Anderson said.
Omer Awan, then-CIO of Seattle-based Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, explained in 2025 how the traditional data center systems administrator is becoming less common as hospitals move to cloud services and software-as-a-service platforms.
“Instead of racking and stacking hardware, today’s infrastructure professionals are becoming cloud engineers, automation specialists, and platform reliability experts,” Mr. Awan said.
Programming is on a similar path outside healthcare. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment of computer programmers will fall 7% from 2025 to 2035 as companies use AI to automate repetitive programming tasks. The agency still expects about 4,400 openings a year in the occupation, all of them to replace workers who retire or move to other jobs.
That detail points to how these roles are shrinking inside health systems: mostly through positions that go unfilled and jobs that get rewritten, not through layoffs.
Lee Schwamm, MD, senior vice president and chief digital health officer of Yale New Haven (Conn.) Health, described that pattern in April.
“Almost all of our AI and automations to date have shifted the nature of the daily work done by our staff, or allowed us to eliminate vacancies, rather than laying off existing staff,” Dr. Schwamm said.
The IT layoffs health systems have announced in 2026 have largely come from outsourcing and EHR consolidation. Livonia, Mich.-based Trinity Health’s outsourcing of its IT service desk and applications support will affect 557 positions, and Lewiston-based Central Maine Healthcare tied its 38 IT layoffs to retiring legacy systems as part of its Epic implementation. None of the 10 health systems Becker’s has tracked cutting IT and coding roles this year attributed the cuts to AI specifically.
Some health systems are moving the people in shrinking roles into new ones. At Canton, Ohio-based Aultman Health System, CIO Raza Fayyaz laid out in April how employees who used to manually manage IT workflows now act as the “human in the loop” on AI, overseeing the processes that have been automated.
“The key reason this strategy is working is because of our transparency,” Mr. Fayyaz said. “Our goal has been to ensure the staff understands the AI is there to take the ‘robot’ out of the human, not the human out of the job.”
While those roles fade, AI leadership is multiplying. About two dozen hospitals and health systems now appear on Becker’s list of organizations with chief AI officers or equivalent executives. Eighty-four percent of health systems now have a dedicated AI governance committee, according to a CHIME Foundation and Censinet survey of 51 healthcare organizations cited by Becker’s in September.
The skills behind that work are in demand, too. BLS projects employment of information security analysts will grow 28.5% and data scientists 33.5% from 2024 to 2034. At Fort Myers, Fla.-based Lee Health, CIO Chris Akeroyd said in April the system has hired for machine learning and large language model development roles, along with positions focused on AI governance, ethics and oversight.
Not every health system is far enough along to see the shift. Jim Feen, senior vice president and chief digital and information officer of New Bedford, Mass.-based Southcoast Health, said in April that the three-hospital system is “nowhere near” having to reduce headcount because of AI.
“We were an exceptionally lean organization before this train started, so in many ways the investments are helping us automate staff or clinician workload that was a rate-limiting factor to the supply-and-demand paradigm,” Mr. Feen said.
Reid Stephan, senior vice president and CIO of Boise, Idaho-based St. Luke’s Health System, argued in March that the change goes deeper than making existing workers more productive.
“What we’re actually seeing is that AI begins to reshape the systems those jobs exist within. When systems change, roles naturally shift,” Mr. Stephan said.
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