One facet of modernity that is getting more attention is that many of today's jobs will be encroached upon (i.e., replaced) by automation and robots. As one current example, you will not find many people working in modern hospital clinical labs because much of this human labor has been replaced by automated equipment. That's why lab testing is one of the biggest bargains in healthcare today. A recent article addressed the question of whether healthcare jobs in particular are safe from replacement by AI (See: Are healthcare jobs safe from AI?). Below is an excerpt from the it:
Across the country and across industries, workers are nervous that automation and artificial intelligence will eventually take over their jobs. For some, those fears may be grounded in reality. Healthcare, however, looks like it will be largely safe from that trend, a new report from the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program finds. Examining a chunk of time from the 1980s to 2016, the piece tracks the historical evolution of the technology and uses those findings to project forward to 2030. The verdict? AI will replace jobs in various industries, but not so much in healthcare.... Overall, though, only about 25 percent of U.S. jobs are at a high risk of replacement by automation. That translates to about 36 million jobs, based on 2016 data. A higher percentage, 36 percent, are at medium risk (52 million jobs) while the largest group is the low-risk group, at 39 percent (57 million jobs). Most of healthcare belongs in the medium-to-low categories, largely driven by the complexity of healthcare jobs....Medical assistants have what the report calls "automation potential" of 54 percent, but home health aids have just an 8 percent automation potential. Registered nurses sit somewhere in between, at 54 percent.
The emerging growth areas in pathology and the clinical labs, from my perspective, will be based on the conversion to digital pathology (see: Seeking Funding from Hospital Executives for Digital Pathology Platforms; Integration and Interoperability Are Essential for Growth of Digital Pathology), the automation of anatomic pathology, and the explosion of analytics in all of the clinical labs. The topic of analytics in healthcare was discussed in more detail in a recent post (see: Diagnostic and Predictive Analytics and Their Possible Link to the Future of the LIS). Analytics was described there as bring comprised of the following: descriptive analytics, diagnostic analytics, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics. I have also blogged about what I envision as the future of LISs as being highly related to analytics such that I think they should be referred to LIS-A's (see: Predicting the Future Functions of the LIS-Analytic (LIS-A)).
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