Will AI Replace Healthcare Jobs? An Expert Explains What to Expect

Each major advance in artificial intelligence raises a familiar question: Will AI replace my job? In healthcare, where AI already supports medical image analysis, personalized medicine, and clinical decision-making, many professionals share this concern. Although AI is transforming healthcare operations, its expanding role does not necessarily mean fewer opportunities for people. Instead, it is changing the skills organizations look for and the way healthcare professionals work.

To understand the impact of these changes on health informatics, we spoke with Dr. Jacob Krive, Clinical Associate Professor in UIC’s Online Master of Science in Health Informatics (MSHI) program. As both an educator and a researcher, Dr. Krive explains why he believes AI will not replace healthcare professionals, the skills students should develop today, and the new career opportunities emerging.

Here’s Dr. Krive’s perspective on how AI is changing health informatics careers and what it means for the future of the profession.

AI Won’t Replace Healthcare Professionals. It Will Change Their Roles

One of the biggest questions I hear is whether AI will replace healthcare jobs. I think there are two perspectives to consider. There’s a common saying circulating online that AI won’t replace workers, but it will replace workers who don’t adapt to it. I think there’s truth to that. When it comes to healthcare, though, the human perspective will always remain an important part of delivering care. You’re not just delivering physical or clinical care. You’re delivering social care, compassionate care, and humanistic care. Today’s high-volume medical practices often leave clinicians with only a few minutes to spend with each patient. That’s unfortunate, but it’s the reality of modern healthcare. That’s one reason AI has the potential to be so valuable. By handling routine tasks, it can give healthcare professionals more time to focus on the human side of patient care.

No one can replace that moment when a physician simply looks at a patient and says, “Something’s wrong.” All the tests may be normal. AI may say everything looks good. But sometimes a physician has a gut feeling that something isn’t right and decides to order additional testing or even recommend a more complicated procedure. That is still a human job.

The other thing to remember is that AI can either reuse the knowledge that’s already available or it can hallucinate. Technically, we say it’s producing new knowledge, but when it doesn’t have a strong enough foundation, it can produce information that simply isn’t correct. Someone still has to verify that information, update the AI, and ultimately decide how to use what it produces. That’s one reason I don’t actually like the term “artificial intelligence”: I think it scares people. I prefer the term augmented intelligence.

In healthcare, you can’t truly replace humans. What AI can do is augment people. It can replace some of the repetitive tasks they no longer need to perform and assist them with large amounts of information. Pathology and radiology are good examples. Those fields are going through significant changes, but if you look at the number of applicants and even the salaries of graduates entering those professions, they’re rising. Why? Because the technology isn’t replacing them.

Instead, AI helps direct their attention to the cases that need it most. “It’s saying, ‘I know you’re human, and you can’t physically see that tiny dot on the image. You need to look there. While you’re doing that, I’ll take care of the ten straightforward images that appear to be clear cases of community-acquired pneumonia.'” That tiny dot could eventually become stage-two cancer if it isn’t caught early. To me, that’s what the future looks like. It’s a partnership between technology and the healthcare profession, where AI handles routine work, and people focus on decisions that require human judgment.

The Skills That Will Set Future Health Informatics Professionals Apart

Students often ask me what skills they should develop to stay competitive. Many expect the conversation to start with programming languages like Python or R, but I usually redirect the conversation. Before we even get to the tools, you need to understand what you’re trying to accomplish because you have to come across as relevant to people in your domain.

One of the biggest advantages of earning an MS in Health Informatics is gaining a deep understanding of the healthcare environment where you’ll work. You’re working with clinicians who don’t necessarily speak technical language and technologists who don’t necessarily speak clinical language. If you’re able to translate between the two and make sense of it all, your work becomes much more meaningful than simply relying on AI to solve individual problems. That’s the part that can’t be replaced.

The technical tools are important, but they’re also the easiest part to learn. You can take an online course and learn a programming language or a new AI platform. What matters is knowing how to use those tools to solve healthcare problems. That’s why, in our program, we spend at least half of our time putting those technical skills into the content and context of healthcare.

I don’t want students to graduate with only technical skills. I want them to understand how those skills apply in healthcare and how they can improve patient care.

Artificial intelligence is an incredible tool, but it’s still just a tool. It should help you think more deeply, not replace your ability to think. The professionals who will be most successful are the ones who understand healthcare, know how to solve real problems, and use AI to support their work rather than depend on it entirely.

New Career Opportunities Are Emerging Because of AI

I think we’re going to see new job titles emerge because of AI, just like we’ve seen throughout the history of technology. One example is the AI Engineer. Healthcare organizations used to purchase AI capabilities from outside vendors. Now, many of them are building their own AI teams because they want to develop, customize, and evaluate these technologies internally.

I’m also seeing organizations create innovation teams. Their role isn’t just to look at artificial intelligence. They’re looking at new technologies across digital health and trying to answer an important question: Can this actually work in our organization? Healthcare systems constantly have vendors introducing new technologies. Someone has to evaluate those ideas, determine whether they’re practical, understand the economics behind them, and decide whether they can realistically be implemented. Those are becoming increasingly important roles.

At the same time, I don’t think the traditional health informatics careers are going away. Healthcare analysts aren’t going away. Data scientists aren’t going away either. The job market goes through cycles. At one point, there weren’t enough data scientists. Then suddenly there were too many, and organizations weren’t sure what to do with them. The challenge isn’t that these careers are disappearing. It’s that some people come in with strong technical skills, but they don’t know how to make those skills relevant to the reality around them. They know the programming language, but they don’t know how to apply it in a healthcare setting.

That’s why I tell my students that the current job market is temporary. It goes through cycles. None of this is going away. There will continue to be a need for healthcare analysts, data scientists, and professionals who know how to apply their technical skills to solve real healthcare problems. The older titles aren’t disappearing. We’re simply seeing new ones added alongside them.