eHealthNews.nz: AI & Analytics

Health Accelerator offers robots to boost GP revenue and patient care

Monday, 25 August 2025  

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth 

Health Accelerator chief executive Paul RosemanFour ‘digital assistants’ are being offered by the new Health Accelerator innovation hub, focused on generating money for general practices and streamlining patient care.

Health Accelerator is a collaborative joint venture between four of New Zealand’s largest primary care organisations - Pegasus, Pinnacle, ProCare, and Tū Ora Compass Health. 

Chief executive Paul Roseman says these digital assistants or ‘robots’ are powered by Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to help general practices do things like claim missed ACC payments and improve cardiovascular screening coverage.

The automated systems, developed and tested at ProCare, currently operate across some practices using the indici practice management system in the North Island, with plans to expand to the South Island soon.

Roseman says the ACC claims robot has proven particularly valuable for practices as it identifies unclaimed ACC consultations by scanning through practice records, getting practices paid for work they have already completed.

"We have about five practices that are running that, and on average they generated $1,000 a week last week off that robot," he tells eHealthNews.

A cardiovascular risk assessment robot performs the most comprehensive work, completing multiple decision-making processes to produce risk scores.

"Our time and motion study suggested that a nurse on average spends about six minutes calculating a cardiovascular risk score for a patient," Roseman says. 

"So every time a nurse does three of those, they use up a whole consultation."

The work of the robot allows clinical staff to instead focus on patient care rather than administrative tasks and seeing patients rather than doing calculations.



Roseman explains that the robots are always being refreshed to fit the current environment.

"If you get a different message structure from your hospital or if you use a different tool for calculating the cardiovascular risk, the robots have to be tweaked to respond to the environment," he says.

A cervical screening robot is being re-released to incorporate differences between HPV and cervical smear testing, while the breast screening system is being reworked to accommodate patients on different screening schedules.

Meanwhile, another robot that processed Covid-19 results and handled high volumes during the pandemic, has become redundant.

Roseman says Health Accelerator has strong clinical governance around the digital assistants, ensuring they follow predetermined rules rather than making independent decisions. 

"At this stage, we are not interested in it making its own decisions," he explains to eHealthNews.

Future developments will focus on increasing the sophistication of the robots, while maintaining clinical safety. 

Currently, when the cardiovascular robot cannot complete a risk assessment due to missing or outdated data, it creates task lists for staff to gather required information.

An enhancement could enable the robots to communicate directly with patients about appointments or automatically order missing laboratory tests, with any clinical decisions still needing a human in the loop.

He says Health Accelerator evaluates new ideas for digital assistants based on scalability across practices, potential to address quality or equity gaps in patient care, and the practice’s likely return on investment with each digital assistant.

"Once you have got a robot that does a job, you should stop doing the job, let the robot get on and do it, go and do something else with your time, which is more valuable to the practice," Roseman says.

Practices interested in exploring digital assistant options can contact Health Accelerator at contact@healthaccelerator.co.nz.

Image: Health Accelerator chief executive Paul Roseman


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