FOH leaders from across the globe shared their perspective at the recent FOH Summit in Los Angeles, examining how evolving roles, AI, interdisciplinary convergence, and new leadership models are reshaping the professions that will define healthcare in the decades ahead.
Moderated by Dr. Gary Kaplan, Immediate Past CEO of Virginia Mason Health System, the session brought together leaders and experts from across healthcare, academia, investment, and innovation, each confronting workforce transformation from a different vantage point.
Their message was clear:
The future workforce will not simply add new roles. It will fundamentally redefine how we educate, organize, and lead healthcare professionals.
Everything Will Change. Including Scope of Practice
Karen Smith, Head of Research and Innovation at Silverchain (Australia), framed the shift succinctly: AI will disrupt everything.
From scope of practice to regulation, from care delivery models to professional education, the boundaries that have long defined “who does what” in healthcare are blurring.
In community care, for example, frontline workers may increasingly operate alongside digital tools, or even “smart glass” connections to remote specialists, expanding capability without expanding traditional credentials. This challenges not only workforce design, but regulation, training, and organizational structure.
The skills required will evolve as well. Growth mindset. Curiosity. Comfort with ambiguity. Digital fluency. Continuous learning.
Healthcare professionals of the future will not simply perform tasks, they will collaborate with intelligent systems.
Convergence: The Degrees Between the Degrees
Ernst Kuipers, former Minister of Health of the Netherlands emphasized the growing convergence between disciplines.
Healthcare, he argued, is becoming a nexus for diverse professions; physicists, engineers, data scientists, behavioral experts, who may not have originally planned careers in medicine but are drawn by its complexity and impact.
Daryl Tol of General Catalyst echoed this sentiment, describing the importance of building “degrees between the degrees.” The future does not belong solely to traditional physicians or engineers, but to hybrid professionals who can bridge clinical, technological, operational, and human domains.
Programs that combine medicine and engineering, such as dual-degree models emerging in Europe and the U.S., are already oversubscribed, a signal that learners see where the field is heading.
The implication: healthcare education must become more modular, interdisciplinary, and fluid.
We Cannot Trust Ourselves to Change Ourselves
One of the most provocative moments came when Toll compared healthcare’s resistance to change with the banking industry’s transformation.
If bank tellers had the cultural status of physicians and nurses, he asked, how long would ATMs have been delayed?
Healthcare’s prestige and professional protectionism can slow necessary change. As one leading oncologist recently admitted, “99% of my job could be done by AI, and if I don’t help drive that change, I’m failing my calling.”
This was not a dismissal of clinicians. It was a call for humility.
The profession must shepherd transformation, or risk being reshaped by external forces without its guidance.
Transitional Roles: Getting from A to B
Lawrence Rosenberg, President and CEO of Integrated Health & Social Services, University Network for West-Central Montreal cautioned against assuming transformation happens overnight.
You cannot simply “snap your fingers” and create tomorrow’s workforce.
He described workforce planning as a portfolio investment:
- Short-term assets: today’s clinicians, who must be supported, retained, and protected from burnout.
- Long-term assets: emerging professions that will define the next era.
- Transitional roles: hybrid positions that help bridge the gap.
Five years ago, few organizations had Chief Medical Information Officers. Today, they are indispensable. The same pattern will repeat with AI-integrated clinical roles, digital operations leaders, and human–technology interface specialists.
Strategic workforce planning must address all three horizons simultaneously.
Education: The System Is Not Moving Fast Enough
Perhaps the most concerning theme was the rigidity of traditional training systems.
Several panelists shared firsthand experiences attempting to introduce new curricula, from systems engineering electives to virtual care training, only to be told that established medical programs “cannot change.”
Yet healthcare delivery is already changing.
If universities do not evolve, health systems may increasingly build their own training pathways in-house, accelerating a separation between academic and operational realities.
The opportunity, according to Kuipers and others, lies not only in rewriting entire curricula but in fostering far greater cross-disciplinary exposure: medical students learning logistics from aerospace engineers; engineers rotating through hospitals; nurses trained alongside technologists.
The future workforce must be educated across silos, not within them.
Ethics, Consent, and the Human Dimension
As AI expands into predictive analytics, voice monitoring, and behavioral detection, ethical considerations become mission critical.
Kuipers shared an example of AI-enabled voice recognition tools designed to detect early signs of depression or dementia, a powerful application with equally powerful ethical implications.
Panelists agreed that ethicists must play a central role. But they also emphasized the importance of consent, potentially rethinking consent not as a one-time event before a procedure, but as an ongoing relationship embedded within care models.
Standardization and personalization must coexist.
Will We Lose Empathy?
Are we at risk of losing the art of medicine?
AI tools, early studies suggest, may demonstrate higher measured empathy than some clinicians, smoothing variation in human communication. Yet empathy is not merely scripted language. It is apprenticeship, mentorship, shared professional identity.
Rosenberg raised a powerful caution: as AI permeates care environments, we must not lose the mentorship model that shapes clinicians through lived example.
Others offered a different perspective: if technology removes administrative burden and “pajama time,” clinicians may finally reclaim time for human connection.
The consensus: empathy must be designed into systems intentionally. It will not survive by accident.
The Takeaway
Emerging healthcare professions will not simply add new titles to organizational charts. They will redefine how knowledge converges, how care teams function, and how education prepares individuals for hybrid, evolving roles.
The transformation requires:
- Humility within existing professions
- Strategic planning across short-, medium-, and long-term workforce horizons
- Modular, interdisciplinary education models
- Ethical frameworks that evolve alongside AI
- Leadership committed to preserving humanity while embracing innovation
As Dr. Kaplan concluded, shame on us if we cannot figure out how to preserve the human connection, leverage technology, and improve health and well-being at the same time.
The future workforce is already forming.
The question is whether our institutions are ready to support it.
