Q: Will Digital Health Technology Replace Healthcare Professionals?

A: Yes and No. Here is why:

Repetitive and systematic routine tasks will be replaced, eventually. Intelligent systems are damn good at that. Medical billing and surgical scheduling will be needing less and less of human intervention. This is good news, healthcare professionals can now skill up for more patient-centric care delivery.
Solving patient cases require a special type of a critical thinker, namely the abductive logician who can be logical and creative simultaneously. The physician is capable of inferring relevant information from sparse data providing the right diagnosis of multi-modal patient cases. An artificial agent will be struggling in finding a creative jump from unrelated list of data. Let alone, incomplete data.
Sophistical biomedical technologies requires high-level of competency. That is a multi-level psychomotor and problem solving skills. Automated Robotic systems, as of late, are not yet there to be able to conduct a biopsy on a brain. The level of precision and human expertise is unquestioned here. A robotic support, however, is very welcome!
Algorithms and Intelligent systems are not enough to automate such a complex environment of healthcare, on their own. A surgical theater, for instance, is more like a football game with all its complexity that requires harmonious teamwork of all healthcare providers at such a critical operation.
Simply said: Human connection cannot be programmed.

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