While AI has persisted as a prominent topic regarding the future of U.S. jobs and companies, healthcare has remained a more unusual outlier.
As professionals across industries raise concerns about AI job losses, healthcare, with its persistent talent shortages and strong job growth, has remained largely insulated from cuts. A recent report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas found that AI was linked to 40% of job eliminations in May across industries. Meanwhile, hospitals and health systems have started seeing a shift in more applicants from non-traditional backgrounds as healthcare emerges as a potential landing spot for workers displaced from AI-affected fields, even without clinical training.
Sixteen economists, including academic researchers and an economics Nobel laureate, recently shared their outlooks on how AI will reshape the economy, workers and the workplace, The Wall Street Journal reported June 9.
Here are five of their healthcare-related predictions:
1. AI will lower barriers to entry for some roles, including in healthcare. David Autor, PhD, a professor at Cambridge-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology, predicted that some positions will “become more expertise-intensive and higher-paid: fewer people doing harder work with better tools.” Others, he noted, will become more accessible as AI reduces the expertise threshold for entry, pointing to a nurse practitioner using diagnostic AI tools to handle cases that previously required a physician.
2. AI will be a net positive for medicine. Several economists identified medicine as a sector likely to benefit from AI, though they also flagged nonclinical hospital roles as more vulnerable. Careers reliant on judgment-heavy decision-making, such as medical treatment, scientific research and strategic planning, will be “supercharged,” according to Ajay Agrawal, PhD, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. He said roles at greater risk are those where the primary output is a standardized cognitive task AI can replicate, such as basic coding or accounting.
“The biggest winners will be information-dense sectors like healthcare, education and finance,” Dr. Agrawal said. “These sectors are currently riddled with bottleneck tasks; specifically, thinly staffed areas where expert prediction is scarce. AI can break these bottlenecks, allowing for much faster triage in hospitals or personalized tutoring for every student.”
Dr. Autor added that AI will most directly benefit careers where technology amplifies high-cost expertise, such as scientific research and diagnostic medicine, while roles focused on processing information at scale without deep specialization face the greatest displacement risk.
3. Offshoring is vulnerable. Nicholas Bloom, PhD, a professor at Stanford (Calif.) University, identified offshoring as among the first areas to feel significant disruption. Organizations that send coding, call center operations, payroll and other repetitive tasks overseas are already seeing reduced demand as some firms switch to AI, he said.
Hospitals and health systems are among those that rely on offshore vendors for certain functions. Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health, for instance, plans to use AI in the future of its revenue cycle.
“We believe AI can help reduce cost, improve outcomes, and give us better insight into which function should be in source and which should be supported externally,” CFO Michael Browning said on the system’s May 29 earnings call. “While we will use offshore vendors, that work would be limited to back office functions, not patient-facing activity.”
4. People will become healthier. Tomas Philipson, PhD, a University of Chicago professor emeritus and former vice chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, argued that AI’s most significant and underappreciated effect will be on human health and longevity.
“We are already seeing AI developing new treatments, improving prevention through better and earlier screening and diagnosis, and allowing patients to get access to better and cheaper medical advice compared to taking a day off to consult with your doctor,” Dr. Philipson said.
5. Younger workers may have an advantage. While younger employees are often expected to bear the brunt of AI-related displacement, they also have more runway to adapt, according to Martha Gimbel, executive director and co-founder of the Budget Lab at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. Older workers who hold on to their roles longer but are eventually displaced may face a harder road back into the job market, Ms. Gimbel said.
Dr. Autor echoed that entry-level workers could actually benefit from AI, which “can compress the learning curve, allowing less-experienced people to perform at higher levels sooner.”
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