Unpacking AI in Healthcare

The clock is ticking for organisations to create significant and sustained value through their Generative AI initiatives. Promising pilots have led to more investments, escalating expectations and new challenges, according to the Wave 3, Q3 edition of The State of Generative AI in the Enterprise series, Moving from potential to performance, with 63% of organisations recently confirming they are increasing investments on Generative AI given strong value seen to date.

This blog post captures the key insights shared during the Health Innovation Conference (HIC) seminar, hosted by Deloitte. It includes highlights from the discussions, data interpretations, and survey results.

According to Justin Scanlan, Deloitte’s Healthcare, Lifesciences and Human Services leader, AI is already transforming the patient experience, clinical practice, and how consumers manage their own health and wellbeing. However, our healthcare system faces a complex set of challenges, including:

• Increased consumer expectations for better health outcomes.
• Workforce shortages and burnout.
• System performance and financial sustainability issues.
• Increasingly variable health outcomes, particularly among underserved communities.   

AI technology holds the promise to help overcome these obstacles, offering solutions for both enterprise and direct-to-consumer applications. The journey has just begun.

According to research by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions and recent surveys, over 70% of healthcare professionals believe that AI will significantly transform the industry within the next five years. Additionally, 75% of leading healthcare providers are experimenting with data and AI solutions, and 82% of these providers have implemented or plan to implement governance and oversight structures for generative AI. Leaders see promise in generative AI for improving efficiencies (92%) and enabling quicker decision-making (65%).

This aligns well with the views of healthcare leaders who attended the recent HIC 2024 breakfast seminar, hosted by Deloitte and AWS, to discuss the current state and future of AI in healthcare in Australia. Of these leaders, 66% confirmed that while we are somewhat ready for AI, significant challenges remain. According to one senior healthcare leader, "AI has the potential to revolutionise healthcare, but we must ensure that all members of our workforce are on board and adequately trained." They further emphasised, "We need to focus on a few key areas and do them exceptionally well rather than spreading ourselves too thin." 

The challenges leaders believe we should focus on, include eliminating myths and misinformation, developing regulatory and governance controls, ensuring data quality and efficacy of emerging models and applying change management and culture awareness programs.

The key areas leaders believed Data and AI in Healthcare can best be applied, can be summarised into three categories:

• Patient-oriented AI (including consumer selfcare, personalised health, literacy and medications)
• Clinician-oriented AI (including diagnostics, research, decision support, treatment planning)
• Administrative- and operational-oriented AI (including coding, patient flow, multi-disciplinary team connection, rostering, scheduling, back-office processes)

The HIC 2024 conference highlighted AI use cases in healthcare, ranging from simple to complex tasks—everything from ambient listening for clinical notes to medical record review, population health trending and analytics, therapeutic drug and device design, analysing radiology images, making clinical diagnoses and treatment plans, and even communicating in multiple ways with patients. AI isn’t just for healthcare providers; it also plays a significant role in helping consumers manage their own health, leading to better overall outcomes.

In fact, according to a recent report by Deloitte Access Economics and the Deloitte AI Institute, Australians are increasingly expecting generative AI to generate significant economic and social change. Currently, 47% of Australian employees believe generative AI will enhance social outcomes in areas like healthcare, which is up 24% from last year.

However, the majority of leaders who engaged in this survey believe that while AI provides valuable insights, human interpretation and participation are crucial for ensuring better context, accuracy and reliability. And as such governance, training and awareness, clinical safety and quality, evaluation and culture and change are required in the design of new workflows.  

Leaders agreed that putting consumers and patient outcomes at the centre of any technological shift, and ensuring broader social determinants and context are always considered, are the most crucial elements to get right to drive confidence and further application.

How can your healthcare institution better support the integration of AI and human expertise?

Health leaders believe that having strong feedback loops, validation models, and augmented experiences blending analytical insights with human intervention will lead to increased confidence, further investment, and greater uptake. Health providers and peak bodies should begin with policies, training, and education campaigns to empower and enable the integration of AI and human expertise.

Finally, health leaders recommend starting in areas that enhance and differentiate existing capabilities such as coding, revenue cycle management, scheduling, and rostering. These areas provide better decision support in clinical workflows, patient engagement, virtual care, and command centres, offering the greatest immediate opportunities. Additionally, they suggest seeking out focused use cases in transformational areas such as diagnostics, imaging, and personalised healthcare.

A Call to Action for Gen AI

The HIC 2024 breakfast seminar provided valuable insights into the current state and future of AI in healthcare. Successful integration of generative AI into healthcare hinges on effectively balancing the potential for impactful improvements against inherent risks. This aligns with the latest release of the State of Generative AI report, which highlights that preparedness has quadrupled to 28% and that client conversations have prominently centred around establishing effective guardrails to mitigate risk while still fostering innovation. The rise of generative AI means that both business leaders and employees need to think strategically and act proactively to respond to the rapidly changing environment.

So, what are the critical steps business leaders can take now? Based on the analysis from the recent report by Deloitte Access Economics and the Deloitte AI Institute, three high-impact moves stood out:

1. Develop and implement a generative AI strategy that focuses on your business’s core value areas. The strategy should outline how AI can help boost the competitive advantage of your business and include plans to engage employees (e.g., through providing guidelines) and invest in the technology (e.g., by purchasing bespoke AI products).
2. Empower your employees to own their AI journey. This could involve delivering short training sessions with practical examples, leveraging expertise from trusted partners, and encouraging greater collaboration between employees using the technology – for example, through a competition or showcase. Maintaining competitive advantage will require businesses to proactively upskill their employees rather than waiting for education providers to catch up.
3. Develop your data infrastructure and data governance iteratively as needed to embrace gen AI. This may include improvements to the quality of structured data through data cleaning, as well as the establishment of a key governance framework for managing risks.

For more please see link to Deloitte’s AI in Healthcare series, From code to cure, how Generative AI can reshape the health frontier, Deloitte’s Australia Healthcare Reimagined series, Generative AI: Ready or not, here we come update (deloitte.com)

Authors:

Justin Scanlan, Health and Human Services, National Lead Partner

Ryan McFarlane, Partner, Financial Advisory