A Reasonable Way to Look at Automation in Healthcare

We’ve all read the headlines that talk about how the doctor is going to be replaced by some AI bot. The predictable reaction from doctors is that they don’t see how this could be possible. The conversation then becomes pretty cyclical and nothing really gets accomplished from those discussions.

Instead, I like this graphic that David Chou shared about how we should think about automation in healthcare:

This graphic is fantastic because it shows the range of things that can be automated and what percentage of those tasks can be automated. This is a much more realistic picture of what we should expect from healthcare automation. Certainly, we could quibble over the percentages (for example, I think applying expertise will actually be much higher), but this illustrates much more clearly that humans are still going to be required, but that there’s a huge opportunity to automate healthcare

It is clear to me that automation is coming to healthcare. It’s more a question of whether an organization will embrace automation or not. Like in most technology, you probably don’t want to be the first adopter of automation, but there’s value in being one of the early adopters. That experience will give you the early learning experience which will help you shape the direction of your organization. Plus, it will take time for an organization to learn the value of automation so it’s ready to fully embrace it.

What’s your take on healthcare automation? Where are you seeing this happen already? Is there something in this graphic that resonates with you? Let us know on social media with @HealthcareScene or in the comments.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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