AI and employment law: So far, health care has been immune from AI-related layoffs

Although there have been few publicly reported artificial intelligence (AI)-driven layoffs in health care, companies such as Amazon have announced large-scale job cuts — approximately 30,000 positions in total — explicitly tied to the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) tools. In health care, one of the more prominent examples involved Revere Health, which eliminated nearly 200 jobs, or about 7% of its workforce, in a move described as largely driven by AI, particularly affecting coders and related positions. Christopher S. Mayer, J.D., an employment law specialist with the firm Frier Levitt, summarizes what has been announced publicly.

Medical Economics: Have there been any major AI-related layoffs across the health care sector?

Christopher S. Mayer, J.D.: That's a great question there. There haven't been many public ones. I mean, what we're seeing is more like the Amazons of the world, where the Amazon recently started in October last year, eliminated 30,000 jobs, and those were good, high-paying jobs, kind of across the board. And they specifically said that this was AI-driven. It says we're integrating and adopting AI tools in our business, so we're going that route. There haven't been a lot of prominent examples in health care, and part of that is because I think the layoffs will be smaller. If you're talking about a small provider, which I know is a lot of the audience here, they're never going to be covered by, say, the federal or state WARN Act. So they're not going to have to report a layoff to a provider or to the state or to the folks that have to be notified under the WARN Act, because their layoffs just aren't going to be covered by it. And a lot of those providers just aren't covered by the WARN Act to begin with.

What we're going to see more of, I think, is with larger health systems when they're making reductions, and that's kind of the most prominent one that we've seen so far out in Utah, a health system, Revere Health, I believe, is the name of it. They eliminated almost 200 jobs, nearly 7% of its entire workforce, and that was a largely AI-driven layoff. It was a lot of coders and other folks who were expected to start to lose their jobs in the AI world.