Physicians have been hearing “artificial intelligence” as a buzzword for years, but many told Becker’s the real disruption won’t come from one flashy tool or a single breakthrough product.
Instead, it will come as AI gets embedded into the everyday work of medicine, quietly reshaping how practices get paid, how clinicians spend their time and how decisions get made.
Here’s how physicians said AI will disrupt healthcare:
The financial disruption
Brandon Ortega, MD, an orthopedic spine surgeon at Long Beach (Calif.) Lakewood Orthopaedic Institute, tied AI’s impact to economics, arguing the disruption will be amplified by the ongoing shift toward value-based, data-driven reimbursement.
“Historically, physicians were primarily compensated based on volume. That model is clearly evolving,” he said.
As payers and health systems demand predictable costs, measurable outcomes and efficiency across an episode of care, Dr. Ortega sees AI accelerating the operational side of that transition. This won’t be just by improving decision-making, but by lowering the friction that makes value-based models hard to execute day-to-day.
“AI is dramatically reducing administrative overhead, and changing how clinical decision-making and patient engagement occur,” he said.
In that environment, he said, the practices that remain financially strong won’t be those that merely adopt AI tools, but those that use the tools to improve access, streamline operations and diversify revenue beyond traditional clinic and surgical income.
The administrative disruption
George Chiang, MD, a neurologist at Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego, said the next disruptor isn’t the “flashy” clinical side of AI. Instead, it’s the administrative side, where health systems and employers are increasingly using automation to lower labor costs and speed up routine processes.
“The flashy side of healthcare AI is clinical care but even AI scribes and [computer-aided design] or other specialty diagnostic AI, which is thought to be more ‘threatening,’ still require human final reads,” he said. “As we see the rest of the corporate world embrace digital AI for business/admin operations to decrease labor costs, we physicians will need to adapt.”
Even as clinical tools evolve, physicians may feel AI’s impact first through how work moves around them, which tasks are offloaded, which are standardized, and what gets measured, routed or approved without a human in the middle.
The documentation disruption
If the administrative disruption is about how practices run, the documentation disruption is about what ends up in the chart, and how much of that work can be automated.
Marc Shelton, MD, associate CMO of strategic initiatives at the St. Louis-based University of Missouri Health System, agreed AI is the “clear answer,” but expects its near-term impact to be practical rather than futuristic. He contends it will be less about replacing clinicians and more about compressing the time and cognitive load wrapped around each encounter.
“Probably mostly in terms of help with documentation, coding and billing, narrowing diagnosis, helping to review therapeutic options, monitoring early results and longer-term outcomes,” he said.
Tom McGue, MD, a former physician in Newport, R.I., similarly described AI as a force that will reshape clinical assessments, risk stratification and treatment recommendations, while continuing to transform documentation.
“This will involve leveraging AI to assist in assessment of patients, their risks and recommendations in addressing the individual risks to their health,” he said, adding that AI documentation support will keep advancing.
Dr. McGue also pointed to a more integrated future in which community- and population-level data becomes usable inside individual encounters.
“Community infection biograms can be incorporated into these encounters to assist physicians in appropriate antibiotic choice,” he said. And as AI “meld[s] all data,” he anticipates it generating treatment options tied to likely diagnoses across chronic disease conditions such as hypertension, diabetes and hypercholesterolemia.
The clinical convergence disruption
For some physicians, the bigger shift won’t come from a single AI tool but from the convergence of digital health technologies reshaping how care is delivered.
Neil Parikh, MD, a gastroenterologist at Connecticut GI in Farmington, said the most significant change will be broader than artificial intelligence alone.
“The most significant disruptor will not be a single technology but a convergence of digital health forces that will change how we practice,” he said.
That convergence includes remote patient monitoring, virtual care platforms and AI-driven clinical tools working in tandem. Remote monitoring will allow physicians to collect more longitudinal data outside the walls of a clinic, while virtual platforms will increasingly complement brick-and-mortar practices to help close access gaps.
AI, he said, is already reducing administrative burden through virtual scribes and digital agents. But in the coming years, Dr. Parikh expects to see the emergence of AI-driven clinical algorithms capable of supporting precision medicine at scale — helping physicians synthesize data, identify patterns and intervene earlier.
The result won’t necessarily be fewer physicians, he suggested, but a different practice model — one in which digital tools act as a constant clinical partner, expanding a physician’s reach beyond the episodic office visit.
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