AI: Replacing Healthcare Professionals? By: Janet Li

With more and more industries incorporating automation and artificial intelligence (AI), businesses have been able to scale back on their labor force, and consequently, unemployment is at an all-time high. The replacement by AI has led to worries about job instability, where a 2025 Pew Research Center study reveals that 64% of Americans expressed worries that AI will significantly decrease the number of jobs available in the next 20 years. As AI advances at an ever-increasing rate, the idea of AI replacing healthcare providers feels more and more like a reality. While increased automation may decrease the workload for providers, public fears regarding the ethics and use of AI in our healthcare system persist.

Current status 

As of recently, AI has already been implemented in the health care systems of a few areas. There, they are mainly focused on automating tasks such as medical scribing and clearing EHR inboxes. In addition, AI has been used to enhance treatment technologies, such as adaptive radiotherapy. While these recent developments enable the AI to do some tasks originally assigned to healthcare providers, they are not entirely reliable. As a result, healthcare professionals are still necessary to regulate AI technologies and make sure patients are continuing to receive high-quality care. 

At risk

While AI has been able to decrease provider workload and make management more efficient, AI is still unable to accurately assess and diagnose patients. Studies repeatedly confirm that biases in data make misdiagnoses extremely common in AI. Specifically, AI has been found to primarily use race, gender, and income to diagnose patients rather than signs and symptoms. AI also tends to agree with the user rather than giving an accurate analysis, which you can learn more about in this video. Consequently, even with AI integration, healthcare providers are still important and necessary in diagnosing and treating patients. Additionally, many patients continue to prefer interacting with a human doctor rather than a machine they can’t personally connect to. While AI excels in data analysis, human healthcare workers are necessary to give patients peace of mind and encouragement, display empathy, and address complex cases ethically. Thus, while a few management and administrative tasks in healthcare will likely be completed by AI in the future, the risk of healthcare professionals losing their jobs is not a likely forthcoming outcome of AI development.

Takeaways

Rather than replacing healthcare professionals, AI can and should be used to support doctors in order to enhance patient care. At the same time, medical professionals can monitor and contribute to the development of AI to make it a more accurate tool in healthcare systems.

For more information on this topic check out the Improve Life PLLC Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98yLmqiEvZU

Works cited

• https://hub.jhu.edu/2026/02/23/will-ai-make-human-workers-obsolete/

• https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/digital-health/these-health-systems-are-using-ai-make-meaningful-change

• https://fortune.com/2026/03/06/ai-job-losses-report-anthropic-research-great-recession-for-white-collar-workers/

• https://codex.ucsf.edu/news/editors-pick-study-finds-ai-medical-tools-show-bias-potential-misdiagnosis-and-patient-harm 

• https://iohealth.ai/transformative-impact-of-ai-on-home-health-documentation-revenue/

• https://m.youtube.com/shorts/jViIjeQEhqs