AI adoption drives productivity – new report

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth 

A new AI Forum report reveals the growing role of artificial intelligence in boosting productivity across New Zealand industries, and the forum’s health lead says healthcare is cautiously following suit.

AI in action: exploring the impact of Artificial Intelligence on New Zealand’s productivity, says that more than 80 percent of respondents overall reported some level of AI use in their organisation and  93 percent reported that AI has made workers more efficient.

The reported adoption rate for ‘health care and social assistance’ was around 65 percent.

The report identifies the top five use cases as; administration, marketing, software development, project management, and design.

AI Forum health lead Kevin Ross says that while healthcare is generally moving more slowly than other industries, the sector is also adopting AI, predominantly in non-clinical areas such as administration and finance.

“Health is not just clinical care, it covers a whole lot of standard business functions that everybody can use AI for. The health sector is just being cautious when it comes to applications in clinical care,” he explains.

“The difference in health is that a lot of the data is sensitive and private, so we need to look closely at the guardrails and putting systems in place to ensure that we are not making mistakes that could have clinical impacts or privacy impacts.”

The use of ambient AI to transcribe conversations between clinicians and patients is one area of clinical use, and builds on existing methods like medical dictation. 

“You can walk into a clinic, have a consultation with your GP, and the AI will sit in the background and write your notes,” he explains.

Ross says there are also more advanced uses for diagnostics and clinical decision support, that are being piloted or explored for the future.

“Anything that follows a set of well-established rules or involves straight pattern recognition and anomaly detection, AI is going to be really good at,” he says.

However, the use of AI in clinical care brings real world challenges, especially around trust and data privacy. 

“The area of trust with AI is massive, and in particular trust in healthcare. If patients perceive that we are not taking the necessary level of due care, then they are going to lose that trust,” he says.

The Forum report found only 7 percent of respondents saw AI replacing workers. Ross agrees that in healthcare it is currently about increasing the efficiency of an overstretched workforce. 

“We cannot afford to deliver healthcare the way we have delivered it for the last 50 years, so AI absolutely gives us some functionality, but we are not clear how far we want to go yet,” he says.

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