Artificial intelligence has the potential to revolutionize healthcare in every way possible, but the exact ways that revolution can or will happen is still a wide-open question, mainly because there is no clear vision about what skills healthcare leaders and professionals will need in the future.
A new whitepaper from April Grudi, an assistant clinical professor and director of the M.S. in Healthcare Management program at the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, and colleague Van Tran (MSHM ’24) aims to address the significant gap in professional literature and standards that currently exists between AI and the healthcare industry. “Artificial Intelligence Competencies for Future Healthcare Leaders” lays out an eight-point, evidence-informed, profession-specific AI competency framework for healthcare leaders.
“We did a deep literature search to see if there were currently any definitive works, and there wasn’t,” Grudi said. “There isn’t anything outlining what competency in AI looks like for health administration or healthcare professionals. Everything focuses on AI skills and not leadership competency.”
The result is a framework that will provide a guide to curriculum design in graduate health administration and healthcare management programs, support organizational planning and leadership development, and provide a foundation for future research. It includes eight critical domains, including AI and data literacy for healthcare leaders; strategic AI vision and value creation; internal data governance, privacy, and security; responsible, ethical, and equitable AI; operational implementation, vendor management, and change leadership; external regulatory, legal, and risk management; human–AI collaboration and workforce development; and continuous learning, monitoring, and evaluation.
The domains are grounded in existing scholarship and aligned with real responsibilities, and although it’s currently conceptual and untested, it’s open to empirical research. The paper also stresses that although administrators won't build AI systems themselves, they will make the crucial decisions about strategy, governance, risk, and vendor oversight that will determine AI’s real-world impact.
“We have organizations that focus on competency for accreditation purposes, such as ACHE Healthcare Leadership Competencies and the National Center for Healthcare Leadership (NCHL) Health Leadership Competency Model, but there is no AI-specific competency model for healthcare administration,” Grudi said. “Do they talk about AI in the administration realm? They don’t. Hopefully, this whitepaper can become the defining model of AI and healthcare moving forward.”