The future of sickcare work

Suppose you have a 10 year old and, between texting at the dinner table, you start talking about her future and her idea that she wants to be a neurosurgeon? Suppose healthcare looks like this by the time she gets to medical school?

By the way, what about your job if you are a woman? As noted in a recent Linkedin post, "With the pandemic now in its fourth wave and younger children still ineligible for COVID-19 vaccines, it stands to reason that women, especially working mothers and family caregivers, will be among the last to return to in-person work. If the hybrid model is indeed the future of work, then executives must make a concerted effort to prevent the office from becoming even more of a boys’ club – or else women will be left out of decision-making and passed over for all kinds of advancement opportunities."

Now that a vaccine for children has been approved, things might or might not change.

Here are the new jobs in sickcare.

Or, maybe the conversation in about whether to go to college at all. Fall semester was supposed to bring relief to many colleges as students returned following steep enrollment declines last year. But instead, more opted out. Early data shows college enrollment fell another 3.2% from 2020, according to a?report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center , marking a 6.5% drop since 2019 — the largest two-year decline in the last 50 years. While highly elite institutions are recovering, programs that often serve less affluent students, such as community colleges, are still reeling from the pandemic.

The pandemic has swept away jobs requiring in-person contact. Most were in lower-paying industries, such as retail, hospitality and transportation, hurting those who could least afford it. But what if, under the added pressure of automation, these jobs never come back? “What will janitors do if fewer people work in offices?” writes The New York Times.?

While every business has its own objectives, the overarching goals remain the same: accelerate revenue while driving greater efficiency and cost optimizations. But in today’s economic climate with workforce and budget reductions that might be a tough mountain to climb. How can organizations adopt an augmented workforce using Intelligent Virtual Assistants to attract, acquire and grow customers at scale?

A recent MIT report on "Work of the Future"? addresses what might be the most critical question of the digital economy: As emerging technologies raise aggregate economic output and the wealth of nations, will they also enable people to attain greater economic security and improved health and longevity?

What about rightsizing the sickcare workforce? With almost twice as many job openings as there are available workers, many experts argue that what the economy needs is a cooldown in the labor market. Intense competition for employees is driving up wages and powering inflation, because companies pass higher labor costs on to consumers in the form of higher prices, The New York Times reports . The Federal Reserve is now hoping to slow — but not crater — economic demand by raising interest rates, which should in turn reduce job and wage growth and help bring the inflation rate down from its four-decade high.

This Deloitte report proposes that rapidly evolving digital technology is driving increased automation, affecting the proximity of where work is performed, and giving rise to new and open talent models.

With so much change in the air, many provider organizations are understandably apprehensive about how to grapple with such exponential change and its implications on where, how, and when work gets done.

Interestingly, while 69 percent of US health care providers consider the augmented workforce to be an important trend, only 33 percent feel the same way about robotics, cognitive computing, and artificial intelligence.1 ?What these providers may not appreciate is that all these areas are part of the same wave of change.

Creating a 21st Century health care workforce will take some heavy lifting to fill the gaps that are being created by the formal and informal forces driving change. Those forces include:

1. The recognition that population health is created or destroyed by socioeconomic determinants like nutrition, education, transportation and housing
2. Information and communications technologies are becoming more complicated and pervasive, creating, in some sense, a data industry that happens to take care of patients.
3. The ratio of sick care to health care is gradually shifting
4. K-20 education integration is sorely lacking . There is an international crisis in finding teachers willing to work long hours for little pay and recognition, graduate school education and medical school education is badly in need of reform, and higher education business model is crumbling under its own weight
5. Technological change is happening so quickly, some question the ability of humans to cope and adapt to it
6. High tech is creating the need for ever more high touch
7. Most of the jobs of the future have yet to be created
8. Robotics, AI, VR/AR and other advances will create more jobs than they displace
9. Man has to learn how to work with machines, fixing them not fighting them
10. Entrepreneurship, i.e. the pursuit of opportunity with scarce resources with the goal of creating user-defined value through the deployment of innovation, needs to be part of the learning goals of every student and program at every educational level. We need entrepreneurial medical schools.
11. The jobs of the future need to be market responsive
12. Teaching technologies should respect different learning styles and be more mass customized
13. AI and the 4th industrial revolution will eliminate the need for people to do certain jobs and will fundamentally change how others are directly and indirectly impacted.
14. The job description of sick care workers are different from those of healthcare workers and require different skills. Here are five strategies for developing a next gen workforce.
15. Like all industries, sickcare is becoming more and more of a data driven industry that happens to take care of patients. Computer and data scientists and doctors will increasing have to learn how to speak and understand each other's language. Data literacy in the new Mandarin.

The above threats and opportunities demand a bold response that should include:

1. A realistic look at who should go to college and graduate school and who should not and how to train those who don't. We don't need more indentured scientists stuck in post-doc purgatory.
2. The truth about STEM jobs v those jobs that require more technical training in a given technology. Teach STEAMpathIE.
3. Emphasis on life long learning
4. Required education and training in critical thinking, communications and other "soft skills" that employers are seeking .
5. Collaboration between employers,non-profit community agencies, government agencies and the educational establishment
6. Rethinking funding models and student debt. What is private equity ran medical schools?
7. Entrepreneurship education and training integration
8. Reforming medical board certification and monitoring continuing competency compliance
9. Alternative career development pathways for existing lower level sick care workers to advance to higher level healthcare jobs
10. Interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary training in useability (behavioral sciences), feasibility (technical disciplines) and sustainability (innovation and entrepreneurship)

11. How to deconstruct the myth of the meritocracy and overcome the barriers to opportunity for those not "born into the club"

12. Build a high touch medical work force.

13. Adapting to the changing nature of work, the gig economy and longer and longer work lives and the structure and amounts of benefits, social security and retirement

The MIT task force recommends four broad areas where concerted public and private action are essential to shaping the future of work:

• Rebalance fiscal policies away from subsidizing investment in physical capital and toward catalyzing investment in human capital
• Restore the role of workers as stakeholders, alongside owners and stockholders, in corporate decision-making
• Foster technological and organizational innovation to complement workers
• Reinvigorate America’s leadership position in technology and innovation

?

According to Deloitte, here are four non-clinical areas where the future of work has the most potential:

Finance and accounting

Human resources

Revenue cycle management

Customer/patient services

Here are some ways to educate your kids to win the 4th industrial revolution.

“There’s three job opportunities coming in the future,” says Avi Goldfarb, coauthor of?Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence .?He divides them up into people who build artificial intelligence, people who tell the machines what to do and determine what to do with their output, and, finally, celebrities. This last category comprises actors, sports players, artists, writers, and other such luminaries surrounding the entertainment industry.

“The most valuable combinations of skills are going to be people who both have good training in computer science, who know how the machines work, but also understand the needs of society and the organization, and so have an understanding of humanities and social sciences,” he says. “That combination, already in the market, is where the biggest opportunities are.”

Also, if you are a sickcare worker employer, you will not only have to find workers that are scarce during times of very low unemployment, but those that have the knowledge, skills, abilities and competencies to add value from day 1.

Here are the pillars of the future of workforce change and here are some ways to teach them.

After projecting that 23% of all jobs will change by 2027 due to artificial intelligence and other factors, the World Economic Forum has issued a white paper mapping out how best to transition millions of workers into new roles. Drawing on studies from 14 countries, the paper zeroes in on four key areas of focus: reskilling and upskilling, including the need for more standardized credentialing; better employer-employee matching — in particular, the importance of flexibility and remote-work options; stronger worker safety nets; and more cross-sector collaboration and training.

I'm sure Sarah would make a great neurosurgeon. Unfortunately, if she lives in the wrong ZIP code, or, if Sarah attends a community college, or a medical school outside of the US, she may not get that chance.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA, is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack.