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5 Million Clinicians Short by 2030: Why AI-Driven Staffing Is the Future of Capacity

Speakers

Brandi Stewart
Brandi Stewart, MBA, BSN, RN,
Chief Nursing Officer, Baptist Health Western Region
Jody Reyes
Jody Reyes, FACHE, MSBA, BSN,
Chief Operating Officer, UI Health Care
Jorge Cruz
Jorge I. Cruz, MPH, CPXP, FACHE,
Assistant Vice President, Business Strategy, Northwell Health Cancer Institute
Ashley Walsh
Ashley Walsh, MHA,
Chief Revenue Officer, LeanTaaS

Summary

By 2030, the world will face a shortfall of 5 million clinicians — but the real crisis isn’t just a numbers game. It’s a systemic mismatch between staffing capacity and the volatility of daily demand. Traditional fixes — adding more staff or relying on overtime — create inefficiencies, escalate costs, and deepen burnout. The future isn’t “more staff.” It’s AI-driven staffing.

From proactively balancing inpatient resources and building equitable, system-wide staffing plans, to forecasting OR needs with 90%+ precision, to smoothing infusion nursing schedules and flagging problem days before they happen — AI-powered predictive analytics are transforming workforce management into a strategic advantage.

Learning objectives 

  • Understand how health systems are moving from “more staff” to “smarter staff” — leveraging predictive and agentic AI to transform workforce operations into a margin-protecting, resilience-building advantage.
  • Assess the impact of AI-driven staffing on utilization to create more usable capacity through strategic staff allocation
  • Apply enterprise-level workforce optimization strategies that balance patient access, staff well-being, and financial sustainability.

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Chapter 1: The Looming Challenge

If you work in the healthcare industry, or even if you’re just an interested observer, you don’t need a book to tell you that the financial pressure is on as never before. A perfect storm of circumstances is swirling together, one that will make survivability, not to mention profitability, a greater challenge for healthcare companies than we’ve seen in the modern era.

As with banks, retailers, and airlines, which had to rapidly enhance their brick-and-mortar footprints with robust online business models—it is the early movers eager to gain new efficiencies that will thrive and gain market share. The slow-to-move and the inefficient will end up being consolidated into larger health systems seeking to expand their geographical footprints.

The pressures on healthcare

Let’s look at just a few of the looming challenges healthcare must meet head-on.

An aging population

By the year 2030, the number of adults sixty-five years of age or older will exceed the number of children eighteen years or younger in the United States. We are living longer than our parents did. Positive news for sure, but problematic for several reasons.

The older we get, the more medical help we need. Older people have more chronic diseases. By 2025, nearly 50 percent of the population will suffer from one or more chronic diseases that will require ongoing medical intervention. This combination of an aging population and an increase in chronic diseases will create a ballooning demand for healthcare services.

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