The impact of artificial intelligence is being felt across the health-care industry, from tools that help analyze medical images, aid in drug discovery and complete cancer screenings.
But increasingly, AI is being used to fight one of the biggest challenges that health care is facing: a time-challenged (and often burned out) workforce of doctors, nurses and support staff that wants to focus more on patients and care instead of other arduous administrative tasks.
That’s leading health-care technology stalwarts like Epic Systems to invest in a variety of AI features that can do everything from helping patients book appointments or understand lab results to AI-powered clinical documentation that helps doctors record and write notes in real time, as well as anticipate patient information that a doctor might need handy like blood pressure trends.
It’s also fostering a new wave of startups creating solutions for this problem. More than 60% of the venture funding that had flowed into healthcare-focused AI companies between 2019 and 2024 was focused on administrative and clinical uses, according to a report from Silicon Valley Bank.
Abridge, which ranked No. 47 on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50 list, was founded with the idea of “giving physicians back their time,” co-founder and chief technology officer Zachary Lipton said at the CNBC AI Summit in Nashville on Wednesday.
Self-described as “generative AI for clinical conversations,” Abridge’s platform transcribes patient-doctor conversations and uses AI to add context and data from previous patient visits and tests. That aims to save time they’d use documenting visits and instead let them focus on the patient in front of them.
“Doctors are spending two hours doing digital paperwork for every one hour of direct patient care,” Lipton said. “The status quo was that [the industry] had created a digital world where technology was taking doctors away from their patients.”
Steve Beard, CEO of health-care education company Adtalem Global Education, said at the CNBC AI Summit that “everything we know from the surveys of clinicians today is that the No. 1 driver of burnout and career dissatisfaction is the administrative burdens associated with practice.”
“All the evidence suggests that AI is a fantastic complement, and we should be encouraging the adoption of these tools because of what they can do for the experience that we all have in health care,” Beard said.
But this influx of new AI health-care tools also means clinicians need to be prepared to use them. Only 28% of physicians say they feel prepared to leverage AI’s benefits, despite 57% saying they are already using AI tools for things like ambient listening, documentation, billing or diagnostics, according to a report from health-care technology platform Inlightened.
Adtalem, which has more than 90,000 enrolled students spanning nursing, medicine and other health-related professions, recently announced a new AI credentials program with Google Cloud focused on AI applications for health-care roles. The program, which will launch next year, will also be available to clinicians at the 270 health-care systems across the U.S. with which Adtalem is partnered.
The new program will not only provide broader health-care AI fluency, but “domain-specific tools for clinicians, nurses, doctors, imaging techs and others,” Beard said.
“The technology and the pace of the development of the technology will move as rapidly as lots of other innovations have, but the critical contingency that has to be solved for is workforce readiness,” Beard said. “How do we get clinicians ready to adopt these technologies in ways that allow the investments to deliver the returns?”
Ushering in AI, regardless of industry, has raised worker anxiety around job losses, especially as CEOs have touted how the technology has upped productivity while not requiring additional headcount.
While Beard acknowledged that “every major tech innovation comes with some labor dislocations,” he said that in regard to health care, “the human element, particularly in the way it drives trust between the clinical and the patient, is something that can’t really be replicated by machines.”
“Clinicians will have a chance to do more of what they joined these professions to do in the outset, which is to be at the bedside, caring for patients,” Beard said.
