Mar 13, 2025

MedCity News Adapting to AI in Healthcare: We’re No Strangers to Technology Adoption, Exec Says While some may be concerned that AI will take away jobs, some healthcare executives noted on a panel that the technology will just change jobs. By Marissa Plescia on March 13, 2025 Share Copy LinkCopy Link Editor’s note: This story is based on discussions at Abarca Forward, a conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, hosted by Abarca Health, a pharmacy benefit manager. MedCity News was invited to attend the event. Accommodations for the team were covered by Abarca. However, company officials had no input in editorial coverage. With AI taking the healthcare industry by storm, some are worried that their jobs are going to go away. However, during a panel discussion at the Abarca Forward conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, healthcare executives provided some reassurance that healthcare jobs won’t go away, they’ll just transform. One of these panelists — Tony Navarro, executive vice president of Red Ventures — noted that this kind of technological advancement is nothing new. “This has happened before,” he said. “When we look at the industrial age, when we look at post-agricultural economies, farmers are no longer using their hands and are now using tractors. And [we’re] no longer weaving, but using factories to create clothing, etc. … We are no strangers to the adoption of technology.” He added that while the world may change with the adoption of AI, there will be a number of tasks, roles and opportunities that will become available. “Adaptability is a constant, and it will have to be a constant,” Navarro said. “There will be advances that are going to be very accelerated, but it will take time. This isn’t going to be necessarily like we flip a switch and it happens all of a sudden.” Another panelist echoed Navarro’s comments. About 40% of jobs today did not exist 30 years ago, noted Bertil Chappuis, co-founder and CEO of Xtillion. presented by “There are many more things that we can do with new capabilities than things that you can automate and substitute humans with,” Chappuis said. “And that’s been the case with the last two big waves of technology disruption. There’s no guarantee, maybe this time is different. We’re dealing with fundamental intelligence rather than some of the previous types of technology disruption. … I think we should be okay, it’s going to be highly disruptive though.” John Barto, chief digital transformation officer of US Health & Life Sciences at Microsoft, added that there is great adoption of AI among healthcare workers. He noted that he was working with one medical institution that was trying to get their doctors to use ambient technology for medical notes. Some doctors were reluctant but the organization gave the doctors a stipend to try out the technology. “What they ended up figuring out is that at the end of the day, they were going home [and] they didn’t have to do notes at night,” he said. “They didn’t have all this extra work they had to do. The quality and accuracy of the notes that came out of the technology was so much higher than it was for the doctor sitting down and actually performing their notetaking.” That said, one person in the audience pointed out that there could be a concern with medical professionals treating AI “as gospel” even though it can make mistakes. But Barto equated the technology to an assistant that needs to be trained. “If you’re a doctor, you get an assistant,” he said. “You train that assistant over time, you learn how that assistant works. You know where that assistant might make mistakes and where they might not. So one of the things we indicate to most medical professionals is, first of all, you’re responsible for the result that gets documented, so you better review it pretty well. … But if they’re using [the technology] consistently, they’ll find the flaws. And the beauty is that they bring the flaws back to us.” Credit: MR.Cole_Photographer, Getty Images