Will AI change healthcare jobs for the better or worse?

What could be a surprise to healthcare experts and industry leaders, a recent survey from Accenture has suggested that consumers are more optimistic about the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine, according to a recent article in the Harvard Business Review.  

H. James Wilson, a managing director of research at Accenture, and Paul Daugherty, chief technology and innovation officer, discussed how the use of medical data and healthcare employment will only benefit from AI technology. 

"The [survey] data predicts that, from 2018 to 2022, employment in health care will increase by 15 percent while revenues will surge by 49 percent," the authors wrote. "Much of that growth will come from three new ways in which smart machines will enable humans to improve performance." 

These three ways in which AI will benefit healthcare employment include the following:  

• Amplifying people’s natural abilities by enhancing insight and intuition using powerful analytics and historical data. 
• Interacting with people through novel types of interfaces such as voice, emotion or gesture recognition. 
• Embodying physical attributes that work to extend people’s capabilities beyond their natural limits. 

"The above examples are just a few of the many that illustrate the power of human-machine collaborations in which each party does what it does best: people’s intuition, creativity, teamwork, and social skills combined with a machine’s precision, speed, scalability, and quantitative capabilities," the authors concluded. "Such collaborations are the future, enabling companies to reimagine their work processes, and this transformation is happening in one industry after another."