Across America, families desperately wait for organ transplants, praying for a second chance at life for a loved one.
My child, at the tender age of 3, needed a kidney transplant. And we quickly learned that the odds were stacked against us. The average wait time for a kidney is three to five years. The demand for healthy kidneys far outweighs the supply.
While vital organs—and families—wait for a second chance at life, growing demand also prevent Americans from easily seeing a doctor. Today, the average wait to see a doctor is 26 days. That's a lifetime to receive care, and prolonged delays can have cascading consequences, whereby a whimpering flu evolves into a roaring pneumonia.
Why all the wait? A severe supply and demand imbalance is gripping our health care system, causing bottlenecks to see a doctor.
A fundamental economic principle dictates that the price of goods is determined by the balance between production capacity and consumer demand. In health care, it comes down to patients in need and the capacity of doctors to provide it. And these two market forces are woefully misaligned.
On the supply side, a shortage of providers has reached crisis levels. The pandemic exacerbated workforce burnout, and 2 in 5 practicing physicians will reach the age of retirement within the decade. When it comes to the next generation of physicians, there aren't enough residency spots for medical school graduates, and fewer students pursue careers as primary-care doctors, opting instead to specialize to receive higher pay.
As doctors exit the profession, the demand for care grows.
The health of Americans hangs in the balance, as we're confronted with a population that's growing, aging, and becoming sicker. More people live with one or more chronic conditions, and by 2030,1 in 5 Americans will reach the age of 65 or older. With the demand for care outstripping the supply, the American Medical Association projected a shortage of up to 124,000 physicians within a decade.
When the demand is care, and the supply is people, addressing an imbalance is a complex problem.
We can't simply create more time or explore alternative materials or production methods. While modern breakthroughs, like robotic surgeries and regenerative medicine, are reminders of the promise of technology, health care remains a human-intensive industry of knowledge workers. We must help doctors and nurses to work smarter, not harder.
As the adage goes, "Still waters run deep." What seems like a simple concept—managing the supply and demand of care—the implications are profound. Beneath placid waters, artificial intelligence (AI) is breaking the surface with a promise to restore equilibrium to the scales of care.
Yes, ChatGPT captured our imagination, but what's around the corner is transformational. And for health care, the advent of AI brings clarity to massive datasets that for years blinded health systems from precisely managing the allocation of care.
Health systems can now create data linkages to track and forecast how care is used—across doctors, nurses, and services—to prioritize resources to reach more people in need. And through predictive analysis, we can anticipate admission rates, staffing needs, and seasonal spikes to balance resources accordingly.
Why such a focus on creating time? Today, one-sixth of a doctor's working hours are consumed by tedious, administrative tasks—a major contributor to burnout. And AI is poised to streamline this burden and relieve the staffing shortages that delay the time it takes to receive care.
Ultimately, the proliferation of AI will improve how we triage and deliver care to vulnerable populations. Generative AI, capable of crowdsourcing disparate data—from patient records, population disparities, and propensity models—paves the way for the precise delivery of care to communities that suffer most. Only then can America's health system move from treating symptoms to curing the root cause.
My child was fortunate to get a kidney transplant. Yet, millions of Americans wait too long to access a doctor for common ailments, from strep throat to fatigue.
Health care touches us all. And the sooner we can strengthen the supply of doctors and nurses, the sooner we can heal our ailing nation. The solution is part technology and part inspiration.
American ingenuity is already finding its way through the hallways of our hospitals, offering respite to our frontline workers to ensure they are best utilized to achieve the greatest good. However, the path to a balanced health care system—and a healthier future—also relies on encouraging a new generation of heroes to adorn a stethoscope and to pursue a career of saving lives, one patient at a time.
Derek Streat is CEO of DexCare.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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