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BJ Schaknowski, CEO of symplr, joins Asking for a Trend to discuss the state of the healthcare industry as AI becomes increasingly adopted. Schaknowski explains that symplr is helping hospitals become more productive by helping with tasks associated with compliance, quality, and safety. He notes these tasks have been "wildly fragmented" in hospitals, working "against the productivity of critical healthcare workers who should be providing care, not sitting in front of a laptop, inputting data." He tells Yahoo Finance, "We have a shortage of healthcare workers. There's about a little bit under 30% shortage of nurses today. And by the way, that's today. That's before the boomers age into this next phase of the care they're going to need. We have about a 10%, 11% shortage of physicians in this country today. This problem is only going to get worse. We need to make these folks more productive, which means more time focused on care, higher value care practicing at the top of their licenses, not administrative, operational tasks that have to get done, but frankly, they could rely on technology to accomplish those things." He believes that AI will not replace these critical healthcare workers. Rather, it's more about utilizing the technology to allow these healthcare workers to focus on high-value tasks. Schaknowski notes that nurses spend about three to five hours a day in front of a computer screen when they instead can be focused on mentoring newer nurses and spending more time caring for patients. "We've actually done some surveys. We believe through just consolidation of operational software, we can give them back eight hours of productivity. That's taking a five-hour day or a five-day week and actually giving them another day back in their week to provide care," he explains. Watch the video above to hear what Schaknowski also says about consolidation and private equity investment in the healthcare industry. To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Asking for a Trend here. This post was written by Melanie Riehl
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