The impact of artificial intelligence is being felt across the healthcare industry, from tools to help analyze medical images, to support drug discovery, to complete cancer testing.
But AI is increasingly being used to combat one of the biggest challenges facing healthcare: a time-strapped and burnt-out workforce of doctors, nurses, and support staff who want to focus more on patients and care rather than other arduous administrative duties.
This means leading healthcare technology companies like Epic Systems are investing in a variety of AI capabilities to perform functions ranging from helping patients book appointments and understanding test results, to AI-powered clinical documentation that helps doctors record and write notes in real time, as well as predicting patient information doctors need, such as blood pressure trends.
It is also spurring a new wave of startups creating solutions to this problem. More than 60% of venture capital flowing into healthcare-focused AI companies between 2019 and 2024 was concentrated in administrative and clinical applications, according to a Silicon Valley Bank report.
Abridge, ranked No. 47 on the 2025 CNBC 50 Disruptors list, was founded with the idea of ”giving back time to doctors,” co-founder and chief technology officer Zachary Lipton said Wednesday at the CNBC AI Summit in Nashville.
Billing itself as “generative AI for clinical conversations,” Abridge’s platform transcribes conversations between patients and doctors and uses AI to add context and data from previous patient visits and tests. The purpose is to save you time recording visits and allow you to focus instead on the patient in front of you.
“For every hour of direct patient care, doctors spend two hours on digital paperwork,” Lipton said. “The reality was that[the industry]had created a digital world where technology took doctors away from patients.”
Steve Beard, CEO, Healthcare Education Company Adtalem Global Education“What we know from our surveys of clinicians today is that the number one driver of burnout and career dissatisfaction is the administrative burden of practice,” he said at the CNBC AI Summit.
“All the evidence suggests that AI is a great complement, and given what it can do to the experiences we all have in healthcare, we should encourage the adoption of these tools,” Beard said.
But this influx of new AI healthcare tools also means clinicians need to be ready to use them. According to a report by healthcare technology platform Inlightened, only 28% of doctors say they are ready to take advantage of the benefits of AI, despite 57% of doctors saying they already use AI tools for things like ambient sound listening, documentation, billing, and diagnosis.
Adtalem, which has more than 90,000 enrolled students across nursing, medicine, and other health-related professions, recently announced a new AI certification program powered by Google Cloud that focuses on AI applications in healthcare. Launching next year, the program will also be available to clinicians at Adtalem’s 270 health systems across the country.
The new program will provide broader healthcare AI fluency as well as “field-specific tools for clinicians, nurses, physicians, imaging technicians and others,” Beard said.
“The pace of technology and its development will be as rapid as many other innovations, but the key contingency that must be addressed is workforce readiness,” Beard said. “How can we help clinicians implement these technologies in a way that provides a return on investment?”
Regardless of industry, the introduction of AI is raising concerns about employee unemployment. CEOs in particular are touting how the technology increases productivity by eliminating the need for additional staff.
While Beard acknowledged that “major technological innovations always involve labor disruption,” he said that when it comes to health care, “the human element, especially the way we foster trust between clinical practice and patients, is something that machines simply cannot replicate.”
“Clinicians will have the opportunity to do more of what they originally got into these professions to do, which is to care for patients at the bedside,” Beard said.
