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BL Premium reports that Mediclinic has put a freeze on nonessential new hires and offered severance packages in a bet on AI to revolutionise its operations.
Bertrand Levrat, COO of SA’s biggest private hospital group, told investors on Monday that while the group was in a sound financial position, the healthcare system was evolving, and to keep delivering high-quality care the company had to stay ahead of the changes. Mediclinic has set a target of achieving about R2bn in annual savings by 2027 as it wades into the unsettling waters of AI-driven automation to accelerate its objectives. Levrat, who joined Mediclinic a year ago, indicated: “We have put a freeze on all new recruitments in the group. This excludes nurses and doctors but [includes] all admin staff. In parallel, for SA-based corporate office people and shared services people, we have offered early retirement packages. And people [are] now in the process of accepting the packages, or not. These will enable us to reduce the administrative costs of the group.” He went on to point out: “AI needs good data. So we are sorting out our data structure.” Some of the areas in which Mediclinic is deploying data are bots, clinical coding and revenue cycle management – a move that will make traditional human roles redundant. For years, the spectre of machines stealing jobs from humans loomed on the horizon. But in the past three to five years the meteoric rise of AI-powered systems has turned these fears into realities and is reshaping industries at warp speed.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Kabelo Khumalo & Jacqueline Mackenzie at BusinessLive (subscriber access only)
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