eHealthNews.nz: AI & Analytics

AI offers unprecedented opportunities in healthcare - CMO

Wednesday, 16 April 2025  

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth 

Helen Stokes-LampardArtificial intelligence presents the "single greatest opportunity for rapid transformation of delivery of care that there has been in living memory," says Helen Stokes-Lampard, chief medical officer (CMO) at Health New Zealand | Te Whatu Ora.

Stokes-Lampard took up her position at Health NZ in November 2024 after moving from the UK where she was previously chair of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges through the Covid-19 pandemic and chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners. 

In 2023 she was invited by the UK Prime Minister’s office to join the oversight group for the newly established AI Safety Taskforce, later the National AI Safety Institute, tasked with exploring the potential and risks of frontier AI.

She tells eHealthNews that AI will be transformational in the way care is delivered on the front lines to patients – including diagnosis and management of disease, incorporation of new evidence into clinical practice and dissemination of best practice.

Also, in the operational delivery of health organisations, transforming the way they are run.

"Embracing the potential that is there will be transformative, however it is about doing so in a safe, responsible way,” she says.

Stokes-Lampard acknowledges risks including AI ‘confabulation’ and poor input data leading to poor outputs, saying these necessitate a high level of awareness and judgement from clinicians and a need to constantly evaluate and improve.

“It is just another tool and if the tool is blunt or the tool is unbalanced then its application has to be more measured. It may still have some utility, but the wielder of the tool has to be very well informed as to the potential limitations and shortcomings," she explains.

The CMO believes there needs to be a significant shift in medical education to prepare the workforce. This should include understanding AI's capabilities, limitations, and how it may evolve, with an emphasis on "critical thinking, reasoning and analysis."

"We need to be training all healthcare professionals to work in a system 20 years in the future, not 20 years in the past," Stokes-Lampard says. 

But she is clear about the importance of retaining the human element.

"Any relationship you are building with an AI is synthetic and is based on their programming, so there is that human connection which will transcend the digital interaction," she says.

Stokes-Lampard also highlights the difference in risk and regulatory needs for various AI tools. 

Tools like booking systems, scheduling rotas and payroll systems carry low risk in terms of patient health and should be treated as any other software tool, but diagnostic systems and chatbots require much higher safety standards.

“The testing methodologies and strategies in AI are evolving as people try to catch up with the pace of the technology. That is one of the things that has held back applicability of AI - how do we test it rigorously enough to have confidence in its clinical abilities?” she asks.

In the absence of any external assurance, she says clinical accountability has to sit with the clinician using the product, but that shared responsibility may emerge as technologies become accredited and more widely accepted.

Hear more from Te Whatu Ora CMO Helen Stokes-Lampard at the Digital Health AI Summit on May 20-21 at Te Papa in Wellington.

 
To comment on or discuss this news story, go to the eHealthNews category on the HiNZ eHealth Forum

 

You’ve read this article for free, but good journalism takes time and resource to produce. Please consider supporting eHealthNews by becoming a member of HiNZ, for just $17 a month

 

Read more AI & Analytics news


Return to eHealthNews.nz home page