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Thursday, December 3, 2020

Health Care Jobs Now and Into the Future

As new technology emerges and demand for services grows, many of the fastest growing occupations are in health care. The Oregon Employment Department estimates health care occupations will grow by 14.5 percent, much faster than the 8.6 percent growth for all occupations. Around 24,500 new health care jobs are expected to emerge between 2019 to 2029. Over this period, replacement openings for health care workers who retire or move into other occupations are expected to be more than five times higher than growth openings at 135,055 jobs.


Health Care Jobs of the Future

With health care constantly evolving, many jobs in health care did not exist even just a year ago and a number of new occupations are currently being created. Here is a selection of six health care jobs that may be in high demand in the near future according to Forbes, a global media company:

1. Reconstructive Surgery 3D Printing Specialist
Medical professionals are beginning to use 3D printing to improve their practice and offer more customized health care options for their patients. The future of the health care industry will require design engineers and specialists who can create 3D reconstructive molds and models. There will be high demand for health care professionals who can maintain and upkeep all of the equipment.

2. Virtual Hospital Manager
The nation is seeing a rise of virtual hospitals where a hospital facility has a number of staff on board but no beds. An example is Mercy Virtual, which is the world’s first hospital facility dedicated entirely to telehealth. This hospital is a 125,000-square-foot facility with 330 staff members and all patients are managed virtually via telehealth-based approaches. In the future, similar facilities will need dedicated mangers who are well versed in electronic transmission, ethics and other aspects associated with delivering health care virtually.

3. Precision Medicine Compounding Pharmacist
In the near future, patients could be treated with precision medicine as a norm based on their individual characteristics. This could make bulk pharmaceutical drugs eventually obsolete. Compounding pharmacists will oversee robots that take care of the process by providing them with the right information about the patient’s genetics and individual characteristics defined by medical imaging and analytics.

4. Epigenetic Counselors
Epigenetics is the study of how a person’s behavior and environment can cause changes that affect the way a person’s genes work. As our understanding of this linkage improves, epigenetic counselors will educate adults and the younger generation to make the right choices to ensure healthier lives.

5. Companion Robot Technician
Science is developing robots that can enable elder or disabled persons to lead a self-determined, independent life. Companion robot technicians concentrate on specialized types of robot companions and help design, test, install, maintain, troubleshoot, and fix robots and automation control systems.

6. Telemedicine Nurse
One of the futuristic health care careers already here is telemedicine nursing. This occupation is one recent advance that really highlights how quickly telemedicine is shaping the future of the health care industry. Being a telemedicine nurse means that you will coordinate with both patients and other health care professionals to routinely check in with patients and patient family members, and then relay important information to other health care professionals monitoring the patient’s care. Telemedicine nurses will have a significant impact in monitoring the care and interacting with patients in areas where it is difficult to receive care in a physical location.

What It All Means

Over the next few decades, innovations like telemedicine and virtual reality will vastly improve the health care experience for patients and providers. With all the progress made in health innovation these days – advances in surgical robotics, virtual reality therapies and diagnostic tools – it is easy to picture the hospital of 2050 as a place where exam rooms look like a scene from the Jetsons, artificial intelligence take the place of practitioners, and every instrument connects to the cloud. New occupations in health care will surely need to be created to respond to this ongoing demand for services.

To learn more, read Workforce Analyst Lynn Wallis' full article here

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