How AI-powered automation can drive better health outcomes for all Australians

Making the delivery of healthcare services more efficient and accessible is good for everyone, write Kore.ai Vice President ANZ, Paul Rilstone, and Healthily Managing Director, Dr Tina Campbell

Healthcare is a perennial ‘hot button’ issue for Australians from all walks of life and, with a Federal election in the offing, the quality and cost of services will continue to feature heavily in all parties’ policy pronouncements and funding promises.

Health spending has long been one of the country’s biggest ticket Budget items. In FY2023, we spent an estimated $252.5 billion on health-related goods and services, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Some $178.7 billion of that figure came from state and federal governments, with non-government sources accounting for the remainder.

Australia’s aging population means those figures are not likely to reduce in the foreseeable future. Individuals aged over 65 are heavier users of hospital and GP services: they account for more than one in five emergency department visits and 95 per cent see a GP regularly.

Thanks to increasing life expectancy, 16 per cent of the population were in this age bracket, as of 30 June, 2020. Wind the clock back to 1995 and that figure was 12 per cent, while in 1970, just 8.3 per cent of the population had reached this milestone.

Maintaining a world class health system to support us all

Continuing to provide the quality care we all want and deserve, whatever our age and life stage, is no straightforward matter, for both the governments funding it and the hard-pressed healthcare professionals charged with delivering it.

Demand for services outstrips supply in many areas of the sector and waiting lists to see some practitioners can stretch to many months.

Investing in the deployment of additional frontline workers may help ensure more Australians are seen more quickly and receive appropriate treatment and care. That’s likely to be the focus of announcements from politicians of all stripes, as they strive to win over voters in the upcoming weeks.

Exploring the automation opportunity

But putting more practitioners in clinics and on hospital wards isn’t necessarily the only means by which our governments can boost the capacity and responsiveness of the nation’s healthcare system.

While Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a long way off replacing, or even supplementing, the work carried out by nurses, doctors and allied health professionals, the strategic deployment of automation technology can enable them to operate more efficiently and cost effectively.

AI-powered autonomous chatbots can, for example, be used to make phone calls to patients and provide them with information about the healthcare system in general and their treatment and care, in particular, making health information more accessible whilst reducing administrative burdens on the healthcare workforce.

Tailored, reusable conversations can deliver the facts they need in everyday English or another language of their choosing, be that Greek, Italian, Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese, Hindi or any other language spoken at home in today’s multicultural Australia.

Reducing the need for practitioners to spend time on the phone sharing a broadly similar set of facts, over and over again, can save tens of thousands of hours each year.

Less time spent on completing repetitive admin tasks means there’s more time – and money – to spend on the provision of direct care to patients.

Doing more of what works

It sounds good in theory but, the good news is, it’s already working in practice. In fact, there’s a growing body of evidence that demonstrates the efficacy of an intelligent automation approach here in Australia. Healthily is delivering a patient education campaign in Primary Care to provide patients with information about MyMedicare, a voluntary patient registration model designed to forge stronger links between patients and their GPs and healthcare teams. Patients are sent a link to digital content via SMS and, should they fail to engage with it, they’re offered a follow-up phone call to guide them through the information it contains.

Prompting at-risk individuals to enrol in preventative programs and reaching out to older Australians who receive in-home support are other current use cases.

It’s likely more will emerge, as healthcare organisations become aware of the benefits of intelligent automation and pursue its deployment in a greater range of settings.

Building a healthier future

Improving health outcomes is good for Australians, individually and collectively. Doing so is an objective that should transcend politics, and harnessing the power of automation can help us achieve it, cost effectively and at scale.