Health NZ develops AI assistant with Māori tech company

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora is working with Māori owned tech company Awa Digital to develop an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool to assist clinicians in transcribing patient notes.

Tuhi is a mobile and web app that can ‘listen’ to the audio of a patient consult and transcribe it, as well as analyse and organise the consultation notes before they are saved to a patient’s record.

Jon Herries, group manager of emerging health technology and innovation, told the MTANZ Conference in June that clinicians believe it will save them time by creating the first version of the clinical notes, which can then be edited and added to.

He said Health NZ did 72.5 million community and outpatient activities in the first quarter of this year.
From a productivity perspective, saving just one minute from each of them would be worth $50 million a quarter.

“When I have talked to clinicians, they think on average it will probably save them somewhere between five and 20 minutes per patient,” Herries told attendees.

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Health NZ is working with Awa Digital, AWS and Microsoft to develop a prototype, which they are now testing with clinicians before it moves to 'proof of value' stage in the innovation pipeline,

Tuhi is integrated with My Health Workforce, Health NZ’s new workforce digital identity service.

A number of Kiwi GPs and other health professionals are already using Generative AI tools to help create their patient notes, such as Nabla’s Copilot, which has around 2000 licenses across the motu.

Papatoetoe GP Karl Cole uses Copilot and says having a tool to transcribe consultations saves a huge amount of time and means he can focus on patients, rather than his screen, during appointments.

He says the development at Health NZ is a positive move as having a home-grown transcription assistant would help allay clinicians’ concerns about data sovereignty and privacy when using an AI tool owned by a global company.

However, when an employer or funder such as Health NZ develops a tool such as this it raises new issues around trust in how it manages and uses the vast amount of data it creates.

Cole says the local data source for these sorts of medical AI tools to be effective does not need to be huge, but they do need to continuously learn and improve by being trained on new data.

Current Health NZ advice is that staff must not use Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT to help make clinical decisions, or provide patient care advice or documentation.

Herries said an ethics application is being submitted to evaluate the experience and acceptability of the NZ-owned AI tool for both patients and clinicians.

He said use of a tool such as Tuhi is likely to change the nature of clinic visits as to get the best out of it, clinicians will have to verbalise what they are thinking.

“We think they (clinicians) are probably going to talk a little bit more. For patients that means that they are hearing about what is going on in the clinician’s head and it starts to show what sort of assumptions that clinician is making or what sort of biases are inherent in the decision making,” he told the conference.

Herries said the introduction of a tool such as this would “make waves” so they need to be very careful about how to make that change in the system.

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