AI vs. Human Insight in Healthcare: What’s the Right Balance?

In early 2025, McKinsey released a report claiming that by 2030, more than 30% of U.S. jobs will be automated and 60% significantly transformed by the use of AI. Ray Daloio, founder of the Bridgewater Hedge Fund, says he has started to worry about a “great deleveraging” where technology innovations outpace the speed at which new human roles emerge, leading to a massive impact on our economy.

For obvious reasons, this has caused some people to start asking questions. Will a third of our workforce lose their jobs? Will we all end up subservient to AI-powered robo-employees who can do the work in half the time for a fraction of the cost?

At Certify, we’re not worried at all. In fact, we’re excited. While we do foresee AI transforming our world and our workforce in the coming years, we see this as a good thing, especially for healthcare. The truth is, AI is excellent at some things, but humans still have the unique combination of emotional intelligence and perceptive nuance required to truly care for patients. By striking the right balance between AI and human intelligence, we can create a future in healthcare that empowers providers to deliver the best possible care to patients. At the same time, members have access to high-tech innovative solutions, and payers to streamline costs.

What AI Does Well

AI is really good at doing certain things quickly, accurately, and precisely. For example, it would take an administrator hours (if not days) to go through a spreadsheet containing 10,000 provider names and addresses to remove duplicates and correct address errors. In contrast, it would take AI less than ten seconds to do the same job. On top of speed, AI can aggregate large amounts of data with virtually no errors—and would likely catch things the human administrator wouldn’t. When it comes to specific tasks in healthcare, AI outperforms humans every time in:

• Administrative automation: Tasks such as provider data management, billing authorizations, and coding can be done accurately and in just seconds by AI.
• Predictive modeling: AI can forecast potential for complications like disease risk and hospital re-admissions before they happen, allowing doctors to make preventative interventions.
• Diagnostics: AI can compile data from scans, lab results, and pathology with incredible speed and accuracy, giving doctors almost instant insight into potential health issues.
• Drug innovations: By modeling how certain compounds interact with the body, AI shortens timelines for new drugs and prescription usage.
• Patient engagement: AI-powered bots and virtual health assistants can send reminders, answer common questions, and schedule and reschedule appointments.

AI’s strength lies in processing vast amounts of information quickly, which means significant time and cost savings in healthcare. By reducing the administrative burden, payers and healthcare systems are freed up to spend their time and money on areas that directly impact patient outcomes.

Where Do We Still Need Human Intelligence?

The National Institutes for Health has done significant research on the role of human intelligence and empathy in healthcare roles. While AI is rapidly evolving, it still can’t outperform humans when it comes to clinical judgement—especially when it comes to nuance in areas like patient ethics and empathic reasoning. AI just doesn’t have the intuition that a human doctor or nurse has.

Humans can look at the context behind the data much better than AI. At Certify’s Blueprint Summit, Dr. Marc Overhage explained that if an AI model has been trained with symptom and treatment data for 100 common diseases, the AI model can diagnose those 100 diseases with near perfection. But if a patient walks into an office with the symptoms from disease #101, AI runs into problems. It may misinterpret the data, pigeonhole the patient into the wrong diagnosis, or just give up. A human doctor would be able to reason out the diagnosis, determining if the patient was suffering from two diseases or possibly had an unknown disease. AI is only as intelligent as the data it is trained on.

In our new AI-powered world, the scenario described above is a perfect opportunity for balance. AI could quickly take the patient’s symptoms and compare them to the 100 known diseases, helping the doctor to narrow down likely diagnoses. Then, the human provider could use context beyond that data to determine the right course of action for that patient. This leads to a faster diagnosis, better data, and ultimately, better outcomes for the patient. Nuanced decision-making requires human intelligence when evidence is incomplete or complex.

The Risks of Over-reliance on One Side

A holistic view of the entire healthcare system is much bigger than simple reliance on AI-powered data or human intelligence. Only through balance can we create the healthcare system of the future—a healthcare system that is tech-enabled, innovative, and intuitive.

A healthcare system that overly relies on intelligence lacks nuance and empathy. There is a considerable risk for misinterpretation of outliers— that disease #101 can lead to misdiagnosis and rabbit trails. Additionally, a system that’s reliant on AI can be cold and lack compassion, traits that are essential to adequate care of patients.

That said, a healthcare system that overly relies on human intelligence is expensive and clunky. Slower data processing and healthcare administration lead to countless errors and hours of unnecessary work. This contributes to employee burnout and excessive costs in a world where costs are already skyrocketing.

The Path Forward

The right balance between AI and human intelligence in healthcare involves having the right tools to do the right jobs. Healthcare administration tools that don’t replace clinical choices are a great start. For example, Certify was built to power provider data management in a way that’s both seamless and invisible, allowing healthcare admin teams and providers to focus on patient care.

AI should be an extension of human expertise—a way to streamline administration and costs to make patient care better, faster, and more accurate. AI can never replace doctors, nurses, or even healthcare administrators, but it can make their work easier and more streamlined.

The future of healthcare isn’t man versus machine—it’s man with machine. AI may not be able to replace our human healthcare workforce, but it can make their work easier, more efficient, and more impactful. With thoughtful policy, a commitment to collaboration, and intentional implementation of AI tools in the right places, we can ensure AI enhances healthcare without erasing the human heart at its center.

Find out how Certify can prepare you for the future of AI in healthcare. Book a free demo today.