Health system technology leaders have spent much of 2026 talking about how AI will reshape their departments. The IT jobs actually leaving hospitals so far have taken a different route out: through outsourcing contracts, EHR go-lives and team consolidations. The roles most exposed to AI, such as coding and transcription, are shrinking slowest of all.
That pattern shows up in the cuts themselves. Of the 10 health systems Becker’s has tracked cutting IT and coding roles this year, the largest IT-specific reductions came from handing work to vendors, and several others came from retiring old systems or merging teams.
Here is the order in which hospital IT jobs are disappearing, based on 2026 job cuts, WARN notices and what health system technology leaders have told Becker’s.
1. Service desk and applications support
Help desk work is going first, and it is being squeezed from two directions. Livonia, Mich.-based Trinity Health’s outsourcing of its IT service desk and applications support will affect 557 positions across 120 job titles, according to a Sept. 3 WARN notice. The single largest title on that notice, Service Desk Support I, accounts for 49 of the positions, the Michigan Advance reported.
Trinity is not alone. West Des Moines, Iowa-based UnityPoint Health eliminated 207 IT roles as it moved IT operations to Accenture, according to the Business Record, and Vancouver, Wash.-based PeaceHealth will move several IT support functions to Tech Mahindra and its U.S. subsidiary, The HCI Group.
At the same time, AI is taking on the same work. At Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Health, an enterprise AI agent triages all incoming IT incident tickets, saving an estimated 20,000 staff hours and triaging more than 150,000 incidents over five months, Ryan Smith, senior vice president and chief information and digital officer, told Becker’s in February.
“What began as a set of targeted experiments has quickly become a set of tools that people rely on every day,” Mr. Smith said.
2. Legacy EHR application analysts
The next jobs to go are tied to a date: the day an old system goes dark. Lewiston, Maine-based Central Maine Healthcare laid off 38 IT workers in April after implementing Epic, cuts a hospital spokesperson tied to the retirement of legacy systems and overlapping roles. As more health systems consolidate onto a single EHR, the analysts who supported the systems being replaced lose the work that justified their roles.
3. Data center and on-site infrastructure staff
Infrastructure jobs are fading more gradually. Deb Anderson, CIO of Evanston, Ill.-based Endeavor Health, said in April that roles centered on on-premises infrastructure, along with ticket-based support and custom development that doesn’t scale, are being phased out in favor of cloud, platform, data, AI and cybersecurity capabilities.
The move to the cloud has thinned these teams more than it has emptied them. Rich Rogers, then senior vice president and CIO of Greenville, S.C.-based Prisma Health, described that pattern in October 2022, when some of the system’s engineers moved to its cloud team while others stayed behind to support legacy systems.
“The legacy staff is not as deep as it was previously, but overall headcount does not change significantly,” Mr. Rogers said.
4. Duplicate analytics teams and IT management layers
Consolidation is also reaching the middle of IT organizations. Portland, Maine-based MaineHealth eliminated 56 IT positions and folded three analytics teams into one, a net reduction of 27 roles, for 83 eliminated positions in total. The system attributed the redesign to shifting federal healthcare policy, reimbursement changes and advancing technology.
Palo Alto, Calif.-based Stanford Health Care’s layoff of 95 employees, about 80 of them in technology and digital services, reached into management. Roles listed on its Aug. 28 WARN notice include director of clinical applications, director of digital health tech, director of IT sourcing and ops, and senior manager of data engineering.
5. Transcription, coding and programming
The jobs most often named as AI’s first targets are disappearing last, and mostly through attrition rather than layoffs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the medical transcriptionist occupation will shrink 4% by 2035, citing advances in speech recognition that let physicians document encounters in real time. It projects computer programmer employment will fall 7% from 2025 to 2035, while still expecting about 4,400 openings a year, all to replace workers who retire or move to other jobs.
Some coding cuts have arrived. Rochester (N.Y.) Regional Health eliminated coding positions in March as part of what it called a “targeted operational change,” following earlier technology and workflow updates designed to reduce duplication.
The jobs at the top of this list share another trait: Many are where IT careers start. Service Desk Support I, the largest single title in Trinity’s cuts, is a tier-one help desk position. As health systems hand that work to vendors and AI agents, CIOs will have to decide where their next analysts and engineers learn the job.
