How embracing AI could help your healthcare organisation manage patients more efficiently

By Paul Rilstone, Vice President Australia and New Zealand at Kore.ai

Robots diagnosing diseases and delivering treatment plans for sufferers… once the stuff of science fiction, this scenario is no longer as impossible to envisage as once it was. But while Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to evolve at bewildering speed, it’s still a long way off replacing real life medical professionals in Australian healthcare settings.

And that’s to the good. Given what’s at stake – the health, wellbeing and lives of real people – the healthcare industry is rightfully risk averse when it comes to exploring technologies that might potentially diminish the vital role played by highly trained doctors and nurses.

However enthusiastically they might embrace digital technologies in other aspects of their lives, the overwhelming majority of individuals would like to keep it that way too. When the chips are down, we want to be examined, diagnosed and treated by human beings, with deep knowledge and hands-on experience, not algorithms, however well designed they may be.

The rise of AI in healthcare

But that’s not to say there’s no place for AI technologies in the healthcare sector more broadly. Au contraire.

In fact, they’re already being used elsewhere in the world, to streamline some of the components of a quality care experience.

The use of chatbots in the global healthcare sector has been growing by a compound rate of 19 per cent since 2021 and that brisk uptake looks set to continue until 2027, by Frost and Sullivan’s reckoning. They estimate the value of this segment of the market alone will hit $US500 million by that date.

Exploring medical use cases for AI

So how and where are organisations putting these oral and written conversation simulators to work?

For starters, there’s a strong case for deploying chatbots at the beginning of the patient journey, when an individual first sets out to obtain medical information or advice.

Consider, for example, the patient who calls an advice line such as 13 HEALTH because they’re concerned about the symptoms they’re experiencing and want guidance on whether to wait it out or head to their local GP or emergency department for immediate treatment.

Depending on when they call, and how many other people are trying to do the same, they may find themselves in for a prolonged wait.

And when they do get through, accurately describing their condition and ensuring they share the right information with the contact centre agent may also be challenging, particularly for those who are ill acquainted with medical terminology or for whom English is not their first language.

Information gathering at speed

Deploy AI-powered autonomous chatbots, as healthcare providers in other jurisdictions are continuing to do, and it can be a very different story.

Via a dynamic series of targeted questions, couched in everyday language, these virtual agents can provide symptom screening and reassurance for those whose need for care is non-urgent, and more rapid triage for individuals who appear to require immediate intervention.

And they can do so at speed and scale; slashing wait times from minutes and hours down to seconds, for the majority of callers, and freeing human agents up to deal directly with more serious or complex cases.

While in no way a replacement for a medical professional, it’s a means by which the clinical information doctors need to make proper choices and decisions can be collected and collated more efficiently.

AI can also help align scarce clinical resources with needs, once patients have entered the ‘system’. Better information gathering upfront means service providers are able to funnel individuals towards the appropriate care providers immediately, rather than cycling them through multiple consultations.

Using the power of AI technology for good

Unlike other business offerings and services, healthcare will touch the lives of all Australians, at some age or stage. Implementing AI technology that’s safe, trustworthy and easy to use can reduce friction and supercharge the service delivery process.

Thoughtfully deployed, generative AI applications can help healthcare providers engage with, and triage, patients at speed.

If empowering your team to deliver high quality care faster, and to more people, matters to your organisation, it may be time to consider adding them to your ICT stack.