Digital Health Week keynote to focus on how AI is reshaping health roles

NEWS  - eHealthNews editor Rebecca McBeth

Educational futurist and founder of academyEx, Frances Valintine, will deliver a keynote address at the Digital Health Week Conference 2026, focusing on how artificial intelligence is changing roles across the health workforce and what clinicians and leaders can do to navigate that shift.

Taking place this 18 - 19 November in Manukau Auckland, the conference is the largest of its kind in the country, attracting around 1,200 attendees from across the health and technology sector.

Valintine says the most immediate gains from AI in health are in non-clinical areas such as administration, operations, and patient management. 

This includes reduced duplication of paperwork, better identification of data issues and improved operational planning such as using AI to identify patterns in hospital demand that people have not previously been able to detect.

She argues that a basic understanding of AI is now a contemporary requirement across all roles, regardless of seniority or clinical function.

"Any career in any environment now will have differing levels of AI competency required, there is a basic need to understand it as a contemporary part of actually doing business,” she explains.

However, organisations should not adopt AI just because it exists and must always start with the outcome they are looking to achieve.

Valintine says there are three types of AI adoption; substitution, where tasks previously done by humans are taken over by AI; augmentation, where AI supports human decision-making in a collaborative way; and intensification, where AI is deployed more heavily in areas where the benefits are clearest.

To move from small pilots to full deployment needs buy-in from IT, security, privacy, procurement, and operational staff, and that this complexity is part of why many organisations have been slow adopters, she explains.

Valintine adds that the health system faces a fundamental challenge before AI can deliver on its promise, which is that the data underpinning it needs significant work.

"The World Economic Forum has talked about the fact that health data in the world is the most abundant of any form of data and yet 97 percent of it is unusable, either through privacy or it is not in a format that can be used so it needs a huge amount of work," she says.

academyEX is a key knowledge partner to Health New Zealand for its health leadership programme, which reaches around 1,700 staff each year. 

Valintine says that concerns about AI among clinicians are legitimate and understandable, but the key is to focus on what tools can enable the best outcomes for patients.

Register now to hear Frances Valintine and the great line-up of speakers at the Digital Health Week conference 2026.

If you would like to provide feedback on this news story, please contact the editor Rebecca McBeth.

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