Will AI Replace Healthcare Jobs?

Will AI actually replace jobs in healthcare, or change what people work on? 

In this clip from our episode Top Insights From JPM Conference 2026, CareTalk hosts David Williams and John Driscoll discuss why concerns about job loss came up at JPM, and how industry leaders are instead focusing on the new kinds of work AI could enable

Listen to the full episode here

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CareTalk is a weekly podcast that provides an incisive, no B.S. view of the US healthcare industry. Join co-hosts John Driscoll (Chairman, UConn Health) and David Williams (President, Health Business Group) as they debate the latest in US healthcare news, business and policy. 

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Transcript

David: 0:07

Panelists were asked about, uh, is AI gonna take jobs? Mm-hmm. And they said, look, you know, in, in healthcare and education are two places where we can deal with that abundance. And in fact, the right ratio of by getting rid of jobs, the right ratio of, you know, a physician to patient is one to one. And teacher to student is one-to-one, and that we really shouldn't be worried about job loss because it's gonna provide a lot opportunities to do all sorts of new things that we wouldn't, well, particularly for

John: 0:33

Munjal, not for the people who are losing their jobs. I mean, but to be fair, we're about a couple of hundred thousand clinicians short in a couple of years, but Munjal and Hippocratic was, was showing up everywhere. But I don't you think, Dave, that some people do run the risk of losing their jobs with this AI wave coming.

David: 0:51

Uh, there may be. I mean, his, his point was that, that that's always been the case. We've been concerned about job loss, but the focus was more about, uh, you know, what are the new things you could do? So on the pharma side, it was something as mundane as, well, only 20% of drugs are actually promoted. You can't afford sales reps for, for that. Lord,

John: 1:07

what we need is more drug. Promotion, more of those fun dancing people on tv. Well, and then talking about horrible conditions.

David: 1:13

Exactly. And then for, uh, recruitment, for clinical trials, he mentioned that, you know, the AI could learn all of the inclusion and exclusion criteria for trials. So when it's speaking with somebody, it can actually learn about whether they might be qualified by asking things that aren't in the EMR, like. Do you get a rash from wearing your continuous glucose monitor? So the EMR being the

John: 1:31

electronic medical record, which is really effectively the, the, when the doctor's not looking at you and their type or the nurse or the PA tech, they're typing things in. That's the electronic medical record that really effectively gets in the way of all workflow. If you could build some intelligence in there, that'd be interesting. The, the interesting thing on job loss and, and job creation is what? I heard over the week in a number of different healthcare presentations is the biggest job loss is actually in the IT area. Yeah. Where there's a 40% improvement in coding and coding production. Um, and what the, the, the folks who are trying to engineer healthcare it, leveraging AI are trying to make. The employees, they have more effective and more efficient. So actually I think it, it might, it might allow us to get more leverage from clinicians, but it felt like the AI conversation is much the, is the promise of AI outside of healthcare, uh, outside of, uh, technical coding. Software building is a little bit over overrun.