Is AI the Answer to the Healthcare Talent Shortage? Yes But…

Healthcare technology, particularly AI, has the potential to transform the healthcare industry by addressing staffing shortages, increasing productivity, and reducing costs.

COVID-19 helped demonstrate the potential of healthcare tech but also the limits.

Since at least the days of the original Terminator movie, there have been questions about the future of humans and artificial intelligence. As AI now reaches hospital rooms and physician practices, it’s fair to ask how these smart systems will affect everything from patient care to industry jobs.

COVID-19 only accelerated interest in AI. Faced with an unprecedented public health crisis, various providers looked to emerging technologies to triage patients calling helplines with symptoms, augment the abilities of radiologists to examine lung scans, and even eliminate some direct contact with SARS-CoV-2 positive patients, such as for medication delivery. The diversity of AI-based solutions—including natural language-capable chatbots, machine learning-driven diagnostics, and advanced robotics—points to the potential of technology to transform healthcare, but there are limits.

Healthcare Tech is a Necessity

Technology solutions cannot come soon enough for a medical field driven to the brink of exhaustion. Healthcare professionals were already in short supply when the pandemic arrived, and then skyrocketing turnover during COVID-19 exacerbated staffing challenges.

An Oliver Wyman study estimates that more than 700,000 healthcare-related jobs in the U.S. will remain unfilled by 2025. Although this attention-getting statistic reflects a dire lack of home health aides—the country will need almost 450,000 more of these helpers than we have—it also includes severe shortages of nursing assistants (95,000), physicians (62,000), and medical and clinical laboratory technologists and technicians (98,000).

These talent gaps will make it even more difficult to meet the needs of a graying population. By 2050, senior citizens will comprise one-quarter of North Americans, leading to increased demand for healthcare services. Providers, including hospitals, have no choice but to do more with less, and AI offers a wide range of potential solutions. 

In nursing alone, AI-enabled tools may increase productivity by up to 50%. And across the healthcare field, about 35% of tasks can likely be automated. Perhaps the best news, the target for many AI applications is administration. A Business Insider Intelligence report, for example, revealed that nearly one-third of healthcare costs derive from repetitive administrative tasks. Other research demonstrates that, on average, physicians spend almost half (49%) of their time charting, compared with only one-third (33%) directly treating patients. Automation can help relieve these burdens.

What’s more, there probably aren’t too many people who went into healthcare to shuffle paper, so bringing tech to scheduling, insurance verification, billing, and similar workloads would not only help stretch limited healthcare dollars and human resources, but doing so could significantly improve job satisfaction in medical professions. 

AI is Best When It Facilitates the Human Touch

It’s clear that smart tech will increasingly augment human healthcare providers, but will robots ever take the place of doctors, nurses, physician assistants, and other professionals? No.

That’s because computers do some things incredibly well but lack other capabilities central to healthcare delivery. Automated imaging assessment technology, for example, holds immense promise. Using AI to review mammograms speeds diagnosis and achieves 99% accuracy, virtually eliminating unnecessary biopsies, according to the American Cancer Society. AI-based analytics represents another exciting advancement. Already, such systems are mining health records to identify previously unknown factors affecting treatment effectiveness to improve recommendations.

On the other end of the spectrum, however, empathy cannot be replicated by a robot. As much as COVID-19 accelerated the transition to AI-assisted healthcare, it was the humans in our hospitals who held the hands of severely ill patients when family members couldn’t visit. The need for high-touch, personal care will never diminish.  

Thus the best uses of AI will be those that empower medical professionals to spend more time doing what they do best, caring for patients. This is the approach DocPace pursues. Our AI-based appointment scheduling solution automates a variety of tasks common in medical practices, such as day-of-appointment communications with patients, so staff can focus attention on the individuals in the office. Our AI system also identifies the idle time in the schedule so providers can see more patients, which boosts practice revenues and enables available providers to meet the growing need for care in their communities. 

For more information, visit www.docpace.com.