Wanted: Remote sickcare workers

According to a recent Linkedin report, working from home isn't a barely tolerated eccentricity anymore -- it's become a competitive advantage. Fresh data from LinkedIn's Economic Graph team shows a big leap during March in remote-work job postings by U.S. companies of all sizes.

The battle to bring workers back to the office full-time may be over. Only 6 out of 158 U.S. CEOs said they would require employees to come in on a full-time basis in 2024, according to a Conference Board survey. In addition, nearly two-thirds of CFOs expect a hybrid work arrangement to be available at their company this year. With the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco finding this month that remote work hasn’t affected productivity, Goldman Sachs economists may have been right to call remote work “the most persistent economic legacy of the pandemic.”

BC (before COVID), most healthcare workers did side hustles remotely. AC (after COVID), working from home is de rigueur and likely to be a permanent fixture. The most obvious job is being a teledoc, but, I suspect the sickcare help wanted section will be advertising for:

1. Anything tech
2. Patient service advisors
3. Data navigators
4. Public health disease detectives and contact trackers
5. Finance and accounting
6. Human resources
7. Revenue cycle management
8. Anything artificial intelligence
9. Biomedical and clinical innovation consultants, advisors and medical directors
10. Remote medical educators
11. The majority of people who do not actually take care of patients
12. The majority of managers who supervise those who do not actually take care of patients

Economists at the Labor Department project that from 2019 to 2029 employment in health care in the United States will grow 15 percent, much faster than the average for all occupations, adding about 2.4 million new jobs during that span. Here are five health care jobs on the rise:

Nurse practitioner

Home health and care aid

Mental health specialists

Massage therapists

Respiratory therapists

Many of these jobs can be done either part-time or full time from home with or without using telehealth technologies. Managing these people will require a different approach.

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?

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.
16. As more jobs and care are done away from a hospital or clinic setting, there will be an even greater need for data access, integration and interoperability

Now that we are in another COVID surge, finding stuff and space is not the issue. Finding staff is. One way to address the gap is to recruit those, including retired physicians unwilling or unable to provide direct care, but who are willing and able to help with non-clinical roles, to allow clinical doctors and nurses to focus on intensive care instead or bureaucracy, administrivia and burdensome communications and documentation as well as help patients' families and care circles stay informed.

Another way to fill the pipeline is to create regional public, private, academic partnerships.

So. what should you do now to find a sickcare job in a recession?

Pick and Choose Your Targets

Concentrate on Growth Industries

Pick your spot

Work Your Network

Sell Yourself

Consider a side hustle

Take a Temporary Position

Sweat the Small Stuff

Stay Positive

Redo your Linkedin profile

Since higher education and the medical education establishment suffers from craniorectal inversion syndrome when it comes to rapidly responding to the new world, expect edupreneurs to create education and training programs to graduate the remote sickcare workforce of the future. If you are interested in being one of those people, follow these principles of entrepreneurship and be sure to you have the word "remote" on your Linkedin profile.

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