Building the Workforce AI Can’t Replace: How to Solve the Healthcare Talent Crunch
From reimagining clinicals to rewiring local talent markets, here are four ways entrepreneurs can help build the care workforce.
Read the full report: Talent War to Talent Creation: Why Solving Healthcare’s Labor Shortage Requires a New Playbook.
Every year, healthcare systems pour $25 billion into a war for talent, outbidding each other for the same shrinking pool of nurses, technicians, and home health aides. Signing bonuses big enough to buy a car. Staffing agencies taking millions in their cut. And then the cycle just starts again.
The game is zero sum, and it’s breaking.
The future won’t be about competing harder. It will be about developing a fresh pool of workers. To do that, healthcare needs a new playbook. And the time is ripe for entrepreneurs to help build it.
The workforce crisis isn’t new. But the ground beneath it has shifted.
Already, 75 million Americans live in an area with a shortage of primary care professionals. And the country will need to fill an additional 12 million entry-level care roles and almost 4 million nurse and middle-skill technician jobs over the next ten years.
At the same time, the population is aging, chronic illness is rising, and clinicians on the job are overworked and at high risk for burnout. The math doesn’t work. And this time, no amount of overtime or signing bonuses can paper over the gap.
We know where the jobs are. The question is how to get people into them.
Society is wrestling with the implications of AI and struggling to decide which jobs to prepare young people and displaced workers for. Healthcare stands out as one of the most AI-durable sectors.
Yet that clarity hasn’t translated into coordinated action or market innovation. And the truth is, we have too few entrepreneurs with the expertise to build in this space. That’s part of why the market hasn’t solved this yet, and exactly what we’re motivated to change.
So the question becomes: why has the market failed here, and how might that change?
We interviewed leaders across health systems, community colleges, regulators, and investors. The same barriers surfaced again and again.
Clinical capacity is constrained by staffing and state boards. Financing is fragmented. The workforce isn’t prepared for AI. And the systems that support talent pipelines haven’t kept pace.
But for the first time, those obstacles are meeting a tailwind. Economic urgency, new technology, and fresh policy momentum are aligning to make large-scale workforce innovation possible. Together, they open a once-in-a-generation window for entrepreneurs, funders, and system leaders to reimagine how healthcare develops its people.
Four opportunities to build the next workforce engine
In a new report, we explore four of the biggest opportunities for innovation:
Fixing the Bottleneck: Clinical Placements — Clinical education is the single biggest chokepoint in the system, and modernizing it is the fastest way to unlock talent supply.
Building the Pipeline: Full-Stack Skilling Platforms — Healthcare needs new end-to-end training models built for hands-on roles, with simulation, wraparound support, and guaranteed job placement.
Next-Generation Support: Learning and Career Solutions — AI can personalize learning, boost pass rates, and guide learners from high school through mid-career in ways static programs can’t.
Connecting the Dots: Marketplaces and Intermediaries — Regional talent networks need connective tissue to align funding, training, and hiring through real-time data and shared infrastructure.
We identified these four areas by first exploring the most acute pain points for learners, which we lay out in the paper, along with the changes that would make the biggest difference.
Many of those problems have a market solution that falls in one of the four opportunity areas above. But we also recognize that to unlock full-scale change, some policies will need to shift too. In the final section of the paper, we make recommendations around policy and accreditation that could accelerate progress.
We don’t have all the answers. But we do have ideas worth building.
Read the report. Share it with your team. And if you’re a builder, funder, educator, or employer, we hope it sparks something new. And if so, we’d love to hear from you.
The workforce we need is not out of reach. But it won’t emerge from the old game. We have to create it.
Read the full report: Talent War to Talent Creation: Why Solving Healthcare’s Labor Shortage Requires a New Playbook.
Explore more on AI and the future of work:
The Most Durable Jobs in the AI Era - And No One’s Training for Them - Matt Sigelman
AI at Work: What Zapier’s Chief People Officer Thinks Comes Next – Brandon Sammut
What Call Centers Teach Us About AI and the Future of Learning at Work – Ryan Wang