5 Sick Care Jobs that will Grow in 2018

The sick care world is changing quickly. So is how people work and and how the work gets done during the 4th industrial revolution.

Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t taking everyone’s jobs, but it is displacing some people.

In a January 2018 Infosys survey of executives and IT decision-makers worldwide, roughly two out of five respondents said their company eliminated jobs that became redundant after adopting AI. And roughly 70% of respondents reported that employees at their companies are concerned that they’ll be replaced by AI.

The next time your son or daughter gets cornered at a cocktail party, they are likely to be told by Mr. McQuire one word-but it won't be what you think.

No, instead they are likely to whisper:

DATA

AI companies are in a recruiting frenzy—employees with top knowledge on the subject are so hard to come by that salaries can rival those of professional athletes. At the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in December, companies held parties and gave away mountains of free swag to attract talent. There probably isn’t a more sought-after skill set in the world of technology—a distinction that’s likely to hold for the foreseeable future.

EXPERIENCE

Economists have typically lumped experiences in with services, but experiences are a distinct economic offering, as different from services as services are from goods. Today we can identify and describe this fourth economic offering because consumers unquestionably desire experiences, and more and more businesses are responding by explicitly designing and promoting them. As services, like goods before them, increasingly become commoditized—think of long-distance telephone services sold solely on price—experiences have emerged as the next step in what we call the progression of economic value. (See the exhibit “The Progression of Economic Value.”) From now on, leading-edge companies—whether they sell to consumers or businesses—will find that the next competitive battleground lies in staging experiences

INNOVATION

In his 1942 book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, economist Joseph Schumpeter introduced the notion of an innovation economy. He argued that evolving institutions, entrepreneurs, and technological changes were at the heart of economic growth. But it is only in recent years that “innovation economy,” grounded in Schumpeter’s ideas, has become a mainstream concept. The three pillars are emotional intelligence, leading high performance cross cultural teams, and creating new entities that are repeatable and scaleable.

BLOCKCHAIN

A team from Deloitte Consulting LLP won a blockchain ideation challenge sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). Deloitte’s winning white paper, describes opportunities for applying blockchain technologyto health care to make health information exchanges (HIE) more secure, efficient, and interoperable. The paper was selected from over 70 submissions from a wide range of individuals, organizations, and companies addressing ways that blockchain technology might be used in health and health IT to protect, manage, and exchange electronic health information.

TOUCHER

John Naisbitt pointed out many years ago, the US economy consists of two basic segments-high tech products and services and high touch products and services. The growth of one creates opportunities for the other, particularly when it comes to taking care of patients.

Creating the high touch medical workforce of the future should be about:

1. Changing how we select and develop medical students and postgraduate trainees and changing our p-12 education systems.
2. Eliminating "providers"
3. Moving knowledge technicians to leaderpreneurs
4. Making technology part of the production crew, not the stars of the show
5. Subsegmenting and focusing on innovative ways to deliver user defined value factors like service, price,convenience, accessibility, speed and experience
6. Rewarding those who provide high touch products and services
7. Improving high tech products that are intrusive and disrupt workflow, like the present generation of EMRs
8. Putting quality of service on par with quality of care
9. Using service excellence models from other industries (Amazon, Zappos)
10. Demanding that digital health technologies are safe and effective

We will particularly need those who touch older people. The aging of the U.S. population will bring increasing demand for home health and personal care aides. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that these occupations will grow by 426,000 and 754,000 workers in the next 10 years. Despite the need for people to fill these jobs, many of them do not pay well. That’s something that could soon change, though, as demand continues to rise.

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