I was recently reading Venture Valkyrie’s blog where she talks about Jobs of the Future: Not Only for Robots. Here’s a section of the blog post which stood out.
So if those jobs are going away and machines run the world of money and more, where are the opportunities for our kids and those now looking for their next career? Well, the good news is that there will still be a need for people in the future (whew!), and service jobs of all kinds will be high demand. While there is not yet a big call for valets to care for our robot overlords, it does appear that demand for medical workers will continue to drive job growth for a long while to come and thus the healthcare system will be largely free from total robot takeover.
Of the nearly 3 million new jobs added in 2014, about 10% of them came from the healthcare sector. That’s a pretty big number and actually is a bit worrisome when one thinks about how closely our economic health as a nation is tied to growing healthcare labor costs. If we are too successful in our national quest to cut healthcare costs, we may find ourselves killing new job growth and tanking the economy.
Then, she followed up the healthcare job growth with this crazy graph:
I think she’s right that the growth of healthcare jobs could be a big part of the issue with healthcare costs, but that’s a topic for another discussion. What’s interesting to me is the discussion of robots replacing healthcare workers. While this might be true in some parts of healthcare in general, in the world of healthcare IT it’s a tremendous opportunity.
Think about it. Who’s going to program, support, upgrade, etc all of these healthcare robots? The tech people. Anyone who’s gone through an EHR implementation knows that it requires hiring more healthcare IT professionals as opposed to firing some.
I can’t think of any trends in healthcare that don’t involve more healthcare IT professionals. Can you think of any? I think it’s a great time to be a healthcare IT professional. Lots of demand for your jobs and your skills. Plus, I still think we’re just at the start of IT having a real impact on healthcare.