How AI Training Can Address Health Care's Workforce Crisis

Part 2: The Business Case for AI and Staff Retention

In Part 1 of this series, we looked at the ways artificial intelligence (AI) can support—not replace—your existing workforce. In Part 2, let’s look at the ways this technology can support your business needs and the pitfalls to avoid.

The Issue

When you're facing projected workforce shortages in the tens of thousands, you don't solve the problem through recruitment alone. The pipeline can't keep up. Investing in your existing workforce is a key part of the equation. Training that adds AI tools can help teams that are at capacity.

This really matters for your emergency preparedness.

Workforce stability isn't just a human resources concern; it's a resilience issue. During surge events, you need staff who know your systems, who can adapt quickly, and who don’t have one foot out of the door. A hospital that has invested in AI training can support its staff in meaningful ways. When this technology is implemented correctly, you can build a staff that’s more flexible, more capable of taking on expanded roles, and more likely to stick around when things get difficult.

The Right Approach to Implementation

Here's what doesn't work: buying an AI tool, sending out a memo, and expecting people to figure it out. That approach generates resistance, frustration, and ultimately, unused software gathering dust in your tech stack.

What actually works: treating AI implementation as a change management process, not a technology deployment.

That means starting with the problems your staff actually faces. Here are two examples:

• If your emergency department nurses are drowning in documentation, consider the processes where AI could help.

• If your environmental services staff are struggling with language barriers in training materials, explore potential AI translation tools with their input.

Good training is specific to roles and workflows. A respiratory therapist needs different tools and training than a billing specialist. A rural community hospital faces different challenges than an urban academic medical center. One-size-fits-all training produces one-size-fits-none results.

Finding Advocates for Change

You need support systems that outlast the initial training session. Identify early adopters who can serve as peer mentors. Establish regular check-ins to troubleshoot problems. Celebrate wins publicly when someone uses AI to solve a persistent problem. Make it normal to ask for help and normal to share what's working.

And critically, measure what matters. Don't just track how many people completed the training. Track whether they're using the tools. Track whether it's saving them time. Track whether they feel more confident, less burned out, more likely to recommend your hospital to a colleague. Those are the metrics that tell you whether your investment is working.

The Path Forward

Health care's workforce crisis won't be solved by any single intervention. We need better pipeline development; we need policy changes; we need to address the structural issues that drive burnout in the first place. But while we're working on those longer-term solutions, we also need strategies that work now—with the staff we have.

Training people to use AI effectively isn't about replacing human judgment with algorithms. It's about giving skilled professionals the tools to work at the top of their license, to spend their time on the things that require human expertise, and to go home at the end of their shift feeling like they accomplished something rather than just survived it.

For emergency managers, this is familiar territory. We know that resilience comes from investing in people, from building capability before you need it, from creating systems that bend without breaking. The hospitals that will weather this workforce shortage (and the next crisis, and the one after that) are the ones that recognize their people as their greatest asset, not their greatest expense.

The choice isn't between humans and technology. It's between technology that empowers people and technology that replaces them. The organizations that choose empowerment will find themselves with something increasingly rare in health care: Staff who want to stay.

If you have questions or would like to discuss more about this topic, don’t hesitate to contact me for additional information.

Author:  Tom Kitchen, Jr., MECM, manager, emergency management, The Hospital and Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania