Yah people with even questionable resumes are all the sudden getting job offers quick. I can vouch for that. What the real driver is Im not 100% sure but with the stock market at an absolute peak level and RE peaked, my educated guess is that older pathologists are seeing the future and hitting the parachute in numbers never before seen. The change to me is absolutely shocking after years and years of garbage since I joined SDN when it first started.
I think what the final evolution of this will result in is a collapse of the large commercial glass mills which simply cant staff at the 200K or less price range to make much profit. You will find cases flooding back to community practices which simply dont have the capacity to read them. Combined with a demographic shift to elderly citizens who need more biopsies and the push for more molecular studies also spiking biopsy needs, the workload may move upwards in completely unprecedented ways given there is zero ability for the profession to really handle anything above steady state well.
The question is what will happen when this music proverbially stops.
Adoption of AI slide analysis would be one dystopian future that could result. Ironically most health systems would rather have AI read slides than actually pay pathologists more to read more. AI adoption by any large player like an Accession, Kaiser, VA Healthsystem etc. would result in a total cratering of the pathologist trainee pipeline even more than it is now. Anyone with large student loans (most) would steer completely away from the field and overnight many if not most training programs would evaporate.
From my experience doing medmal work, I will say AI slide reading will end in a bang as sporadic cases of egregious misdiagnoses by the AI system will splash across headlines and software analytics companies that went into this arena will be driven completely under by mass tort lawsuits. Politicians will demand AI read material is re-reviewed by a real human, resulting in massive flood again of work back to the few saps who remain.
What I dont think will happen is a natural market response to a shortage of pathologists: increased pay. Medical economics and political science have now entered a state where the public thinks "pathologists are paid plenty and even if they are overworked and mistreated, they will not get one dollar more!"
I say this because I really see this already happening in some other fields like GI where GI folks are getting impossible to attract however medical groups are not raising their offered wages because the income simply isnt there. Its really crazy.
I remember going to a conference in like 1993 from a random academic who said the future of medicine in America wont revolve around pay, insurance, malpractice, lifestyle, education, burnout or any of a dozen things common sense might predict but instead will be a crisis of ACCESS. I want my breast biopsy read will be greeted with "someone in India will help in the next 7-10 business days." I remember thinking how crazy that lecture was and now I have a bad feeling is prophetic.
