Healthcare Leaders Must Redesign Work Before AI Can Deliver Results

Healthcare has a history of using technology to do a heroic amount of work. Electronic health records (EHRs) were supposed to centralize patient data; patient portals were supposed to simplify access; automation was supposed to make operations hum: Much of that didn’t happen — at least, not as neatly as demos promised. And now AI has entered the discussion. Across healthcare organizations (HCOs), AI is pushing leaders to rethink what work should look like.

But leaders should resist treating AI like an easy button. The industry can’t automate its way out of workforce shortages. AI’s value depends on how well it strengthens human judgment, trust, and care delivery.

Workforce Readiness Is Becoming The Real AI Bottleneck

Healthcare leaders are moving fast on AI, but many are moving faster on tools than on their people. This gap is risky and already visible: 80% of health insurer AI leaders say nontechnical employees understand how to use AI responsibly and ethically, yet only 42% of employees report confidence around ethical AI use. Realizing AI value depends less on whether HCOs deploy AI and more on whether they redesign work, build workforce readiness, and close trust gaps between leaders and staff.

But this should feel familiar. EHR modernization taught the industry that technology adoption isn’t the same as workflow transformation. A tool can “go live” while clinicians still experience it as one more burden, click, alert, or work-around. That pattern will repeat at greater speed if HCOs don’t treat AI adoption as a workforce reinvention effort. Our research shows that the industry will continue to add jobs as AI deploys. Redesigning work will only become more urgent as genAI’s influence on healthcare roles rises from 4% in 2025 to 30% by 2031.

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This post was written by Senior Analyst Shannon Germain Farraher and it originally appeared here.