Healthcare professional (HCP) influencer, emergency medicine physician, and CEO of MedFluencers, Dr. Adam Goodcoff shares insights on embracing AI and evolving career pathways to help healthcare professionals stay adaptable and future-ready.
As someone who has successfully merged clinical practice with digital innovation, how do you believe emerging healthcare professionals can best position themselves to thrive in this evolving landscape?
The best thing someone can do is keep an open mind, and have a hunger for new skills and knowledge. Look at the way machine learning has come into our lives in the last two or three years. If you had asked a clinician three years ago if they found AI helpful, they could not tell you where AI was in the mix. Today, there are tools like the ambient AI scribes and various platforms that are now making their way into healthcare. We need to have hunger and interest in discovering these new tools and consider how we could integrate them into our day-to-day workflow. I think having an open mind is the best way to do that.
What key skills or mindsets do you think are essential for those entering healthcare today?
Be hungry and be open to change. Medicine is well known for being slow to change and slow to adopt, and there are reasons for that; there’s safety and security in the way that we’ve done things. However, now at a time when innovation is so rapid, it’s important to consider the ways we might be able to integrate that into our workflow.
Can you share some examples of how social media and digital platforms have created new career pathways within healthcare?
Social media has revolutionized healthcare by providing HCPs with tools to educate peers and patients faster, more directly, and more accessibly than ever. At MedFluencers, we’ve seen how these platforms allow HCPs to share knowledge in real time, build personal brands, and connect with larger audiences. This shift creates opportunities for collaborations with brands that value medically accurate, compliant content. It’s an exciting time, where real impact is being made, and HCPs are shaping how we communicate in this digital-first world.
What trends or opportunities do you think healthcare students should be preparing for to maximize their impact and career satisfaction?
I think healthcare careers are changing. On the technology side, there’s tremendous enablement, but the way the healthcare system works is constantly evolving. When I was in high school, thinking about becoming a physician, it’s different today than it was then. In an equal amount of time, it will be radically different again. We’re at such a quick and exciting evolutionary pace here.
I’d invest in your own learning, especially understanding a bit more about machine learning and AI. I think it’s become a part of all of our lives, and there are so many folks who just quickly label it AI and write it off. What is the AI doing? Why is it different than traditional search? What are we doing differently with these tools?
