Health system CHROs and other HR leaders are navigating one of the most complex industry environments in years while also preparing their organizations for technology and workforce changes still ahead. For some, that has expanded the job beyond traditional HR responsibilities to include AI governance, contract labor oversight, workforce pipeline development and decisions about how technology changes the work employees perform.
“You’re a chief human resources officer. Labor was human. The question was, how do we get that labor? Do we build? Do we buy? Do we rent labor? How do we get the people to do the work? That was the question. Now, it’s a little bit more. We’re partnering with machines, and we’re going deep into this work,” said Peter Adebi, senior vice president and chief human resources officer at Cincinnati Children’s.
Mr. Adebi, Leeann Kaminsky, senior vice president and CHRO at Morgantown, W.Va.-based WVU Medicine, and Amy Linsin, executive vice president and chief human resources officer at Greenville, S.C.-based Prisma Health, spoke with Becker’s about how their responsibilities are changing, what has moved onto their plates and which capabilities HR leaders will need as workforce strategy becomes more closely connected with technology.
At Cincinnati Children’s, Mr. Adebi’s team began examining its readiness as part of a broader organizational effort with McKinsey & Co. called “Foundation for the Future,” which encompasses the health system’s AI, support and research strategies. His HR team developed 12 predictions about the future of the function and mapped how each could affect areas such as total reward and learning and development. The work culminated in a nearly full-day meeting with over 240 HR employees, with each team member developing an individual development plan tied to the future of the function.
Some areas of the department are already incorporating AI into their work. Mr. Adebi said the talent acquisition team has saved over 4,800 hours through AI adoption and eliminated two positions, with both employees moved into other roles. The compensation team is examining real-time compensation data powered by AI, while the talent and culture team is testing Nadia, an AI coaching tool from Valence, alongside a second coaching model the organization is training.
As that work has progressed, Mr. Adebi said one of the capabilities becoming more important for CHROs is a closer partnership with the CIO, particularly around AI governance and decisions about how the technology will be used in the workplace.
“What is AI going to be able to do in your system? What decision rights will AI have? Will AI be able to supervise people and make decisions about their employment? If they’re going to make decisions, will AI be able to make decisions about keeping or hiring individuals into an organization, or terminating them for that matter, or will there always be human oversight of those decisions?” he said. “When AI goes rogue, and we’ve seen a couple of examples recently, how do we manage that? What corrective actions do we take? If it’s a human, we probably terminate their employment. What if it’s AI? You terminate them, you hurt yourself.”
Ms. Linsin said HR needs a strategic role as organizations determine how employees and AI will work together.
“HR needs a strategic role when planning human-AI collaboration because these efforts stretch beyond immediate IT and operational concerns,” she said.
She also pointed to a growing need for cross-departmental strategy as health systems balance immediate staffing pressures with longer-term workforce planning.
“Operational urgency in staffing is real at times and yet there must be parameters in place in partnership with HR to ensure financial responsibility, sustainable planning and scalability beyond what we’ve seen before,” Ms. Linsin said.
Ms. Kaminsky described a similar shift at WVU Medicine, where workforce shortages have led the health system to develop some of its own training pipelines.
“Workforce strategy is one of the most important things we are focusing on, because we have found ourselves in situations where we are having to essentially create our own pipelines for the workforce and make sure there are enough folks interested in working in healthcare careers,” she said. “We’re developing programs and developing students into surgical techs, rad techs or nurses. We’ve started programs like this all on our own, because there just aren’t enough programs that can meet the demands we have.”
Technology has also become a larger part of Ms. Kaminsky’s work. She said her team is leading projects that incorporate AI functionality to help employees work more efficiently, while she has begun using AI herself for research, meeting notes and summarizing large volumes of email.
“We definitely are doing more with AI in terms of the work that we’re doing, leading projects that include implementing AI functionality to make the lives of people who work on our teams easier so they can work more efficiently,” she said. “I’m using AI a lot more in the work that I do, to do research and to help summarize the massive amounts of emails I get. It does meeting notes for me and different things like that.”
Workforce development is also becoming more difficult to predict as jobs, technology and educational pipelines change, Ms. Linsin said.
“Workforce development is also changing rapidly as jobs change, technology changes, and educational institutions are challenged. In addition, we have a wealth of data, but also so many unprecedented, uncertain and emergent scenarios that combining the right insights into action may still leave some gaps,” she said.
For Mr. Adebi, the growing role of AI also raises questions about what responsibility health systems have to employees as technology changes the work they perform.
“If, for example, you lay off half your workforce and replace them with tech or intelligent systems, do we have any responsibility to society to make sure that those individuals continue to have their dignity and find meaning in something else that they do?” he said. “Do we have any accountability for their survival?”
Cincinnati Children’s approach, he said, is mainly to retrain, reskill, upskill and redeploy employees whose current roles are affected by AI.
“To paraphrase a recent statement by our CEO, Dr. Steve Davis, our goal is to use AI to amplify our humanity, not to diminish it,” Mr. Adebi said.
One example is Rachel, an AI capability Cincinnati Children’s is testing to make pre-visit calls. The health system sees roughly 6,000 patients daily, and Mr. Adebi said AI could allow it to make significantly more of those calls while shifting employees toward addressing patient questions and issues or providing hands-on care.
“The people who would have made the high-priority pre-visit calls might now be redeployed to address any questions or issues that result from the AI calls, or retrained to provide high-value hands-on care to patients,” he said. “That’s how we increase impact and amplify our humanity.”
The degree to which HR can lead that work also depends on the broader organization’s strategy, Mr. Adebi said. He pointed to the CEO’s position on AI as an important starting point for CHROs deciding how aggressively to move.
“The most important part of this AI conversation is the vision of the senior executive. In this case, the chief executive officer of the organization. If the CEO is not on board, and the board is aligned with the CEO, the CHRO can advocate and suggest different directions, but at the core, philosophically, the CEO has to help define the position of the organization on the topic,” Mr. Adebi said.
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