HealthX delivering five AI and innovation initiatives

NEWS  - eHealthNews editor Rebecca McBeth

The HealthX team at Health New Zealand | Te Whatu Ora is working on five initiatives as part of its monthly rollout programme designed to rapidly deploy AI and innovative solutions across the public health system.

Sonny Taite, director of innovation and AI at Health NZ | Te Whatu Ora, outlined the initiatives during a presentation at the Clinical AI in Practice conference in Auckland on April 30, saying the aim of HealthX is to be, “a workforce multiplier to improve care for our communities”.

The five are; AI scribes, remote patient monitoring for heart failure patients, AI-enabled skin lesion assessments, AI-enabled diagnostics, and CoPilot for leadership and digital services.

Taite says the AI scribes programme, launched in September 2025, became the team's first major success story. Initially planned for six or seven emergency departments (EDs), demand from clinicians drove rapid expansion across the country.

"In a very short period… we were in every ED in the country, which when I looked around the world, turns out is world leading for a public health system," Taite said.

The remote patient monitoring (RPM) initiative, rolled out in October, targets heart failure patients and has shown significant improvements in medication management. Without the solution, patients typically take five to six months to reach recommended medication levels. With telehealth and RPM, 80 percent of patients reach optimal levels within six weeks.

The AI-enabled skin lesion assessment programme is aimed at addressing substantial dermatology wait lists across the country and an announcement on this is expected soon.

Taite said HealthX operates under strict criteria for selecting initiatives. Each programme must be clinician-led with clinical champions, demonstrate feasibility within monthly budget constraints, show sufficient impact, and avoid heavy integration requirements with existing systems.

"We are not here to sell to our clinicians, we are actually here to find out what problems they have already solved,” he explained.

The team focuses on three key pressure areas: workforce shortages, rural and remote access challenges, and clinical inefficiencies. The AI scribes programme particularly addresses after-hours documentation work that ED clinicians do.

The programme incorporates security by design, privacy by design and clinical safety protocols.

"We have governance ethics groups closely connected to our team. Sometimes ethics is should we do it, often now ethics is why aren't we doing it? This is the right thing: it is ethically not right not to do it," Taite said.

Looking ahead, Taite envisioned expanding the HealthX model to multiple teams across different organisations while maintaining the same rapid deployment approach. He said the appetite amongst workforce is strong as the team continues to get requests from clinicians nationwide looking to implement AI solutions.

HealthX has also established partnerships to support longer-term research initiatives and pilot programmes that may not fit the monthly deployment schedule. 

Image: Sonny Taite, director of innovation and AI at Health NZ

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