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A senior citizen came to anticipate receiving Aida's daily call each morning.

A daily check-in call by an automated voice assistant was not part of the service the participant envisioned when she enrolled for the in-home support but when she was invited to be part of the pilot program several months back, the elderly lady said yes because she wished to contribute. Although, to be honest, her hopes were low.

Nevertheless, when she got the call, she states: “I was amazed by how interactive she was. It was remarkable for a machine.”

“She’d always ask ‘how are you feeling today?’ and that provides a chance if you feel unwell to say you felt sick, or I might reply ‘I’m fine, thank you’.”

“The AI would then pose questions – ‘did you manage to go outdoors today?’”

Aida would also inquire about what the user was planning for the day and “she would respond to that properly.”

“When I mentioned I’m going shopping, she’d say nice shopping or food shopping? It was quite engaging.”

AI Reducing the Administrative Burden on Healthcare Staff

The trial, which has now wrapped up its first phase, is one of the ways in which advances in AI technology are being integrated in healthcare.

Health tech firm the provider partnered with the care organization regarding the trial to use its advanced AI system to offer social interaction, along with an option for home care clients to log any medical concerns or concerns for a staff member to address.

A senior director, national director of the home care division, explains the AI check-in being trialled is not a substitute for any face to face interactions.

“Clients continue to get a regular personal visit, but in between visits … the [AI] system allows a daily check-in, which can then escalate any potential concerns to care staff or a family members,” Jones notes.

Dr Tina Campbell, the CEO of Healthily, says there have been no any adverse incidents noted from the pilot program.

The company uses open AI “with strict safety protocols” to guarantee the interaction is secure and procedures are in place to address serious health issues promptly, the director says. For example, if a patient is experiencing heart symptoms, it would be alerted to the care team and the call terminated so the person could call emergency services.

Campbell believes AI has an important role amid staffing shortages across the healthcare sector.

“The benefit securely, using such systems, is reduce the administrative load on the staff so trained clinicians can concentrate on doing the job that they specialize in,” she comments.

AI Not as New as You Might Think

An expert, the co-founder of the Australian Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, says established types of artificial intelligence have been a common feature of healthcare for a long time, frequently in “administrative functions” such as analyzing medical images, ECGs and lab reports.

“Any computer program that carries out a task that requires judgment in some way is AI, regardless of how it accomplishes it,” states the professor, who is additionally the director of the health informatics center at a leading university.

“If you go the imaging department, radiology department or diagnostic laboratory, you’ll see software in machines doing just that.”

In recent years, newer forms of AI known as “machine learning” – an algorithmic approach that enables systems to learn from extensive datasets – have been used to interpret diagnostic scans and enhance detection, the expert notes.

Recently, a screening service became the nation's first public health initiative to introduce machine reading technology to support radiologists in reviewing a select range of mammography images.

They are specialized tools that still require a specialist doctor to interpret the findings they could indicate, and the responsibility for a clinical judgment rests with the healthcare provider, Coiera says.

The Function of AI in Early Disease Detection

The Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne has been working alongside researchers from UCL London who first developed AI methods to identify epilepsy brain abnormalities called focal cortical dysplasias from MRI images.

These lesions cause epileptic episodes that often cannot be controlled with medication, so surgical intervention to remove them becomes the sole option. But, the surgery can only be performed if the doctors can locate the affected area.

A study recently released in the scientific publication, a group from the research body, led by specialist the lead researcher, demonstrated their “neural network tool” could detect the abnormalities in nearly all of instances from advanced imaging in a specific form of the lesions that have traditionally been missed in the majority of patients (60%).

The AI was trained on the images of 54 patients and then evaluated with 17 children and 12 adults. Of the 17 children, twelve underwent operations and eleven became free of seizures.

The tool employs AI algorithms similar to the breast cancer screening – highlighting suspicious areas, which are still checked by specialists “but it makes it a lot quicker to reach a conclusion,” the researcher explains.

She stresses the team are currently in initial stages of the project, with a additional research required to advance the tool heading towards clinical implementation.

A leading neurologist, a neurologist who was independent from the study, says MRI scans now generate such huge amounts of detailed information that it is hard for a human to go through it accurately. Thus for clinicians the challenge of finding these abnormalities was like “searching for a needle in a haystack.”

“This illustrates of how artificial intelligence can assist doctors in making earlier, more accurate diagnoses, and has the ability to improve surgical access and results for children with treatment-resistant seizures,” Cook comments.

Illness Identification in the Future

A public health expert, the vice-president of the European Public Health Association’s AI health division, says advanced AI systems are also helping to monitor and predict disease outbreaks.

Buttigieg, who presented recently at the national health summit in Wollongong, gave as an example Blue Dot, a organization established by medical experts and which was an early detector to detect the coronavirus pandemic.

Generative AI is a further subset of machine learning, in which the system can generate new content using training data. These uses in healthcare encompass programs such as Healthily’s AI voice bot along with the AI scribes clinicians are adopting more.

A GP representative, the head of the national GP body, reports family doctors have been adopting digital assistants, which captures the consultation and converts it to a consultation note that can be included in the health file.

Wright says the main benefit of the tools is that it improves the quality of the interaction between the doctor and patient.

A medical leader, the president of the Australian Medical Association, concurs that scribes are helping physicians manage schedules and says artificial intelligence can also help to help doctors avoid repeated examinations and scans for their clients, if the {promised digitisation|planned digitalization