Impressive for a Robot: Home Care AI Assistants Among AI Tools Being Embraced by Australia's Health System

Peta Rolls came to anticipate getting Aida's daily check-in at 10am.

A routine morning call from an AI voice bot wasn't initially included in the care package Rolls expected when she enrolled for St Vincent’s home care but when she was invited to be part of the pilot program several months back, the elderly lady agreed because she wished to contribute. Although, to be honest, her expectations were low.

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

“The system would inquire ‘how you are today?’ and that provides a chance if you feel unwell to say you felt sick, or I just say ‘I’m fine, thank you’.”

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

Aida would also ask what Rolls had planned for the day and “she would respond to that properly.”

“When I mentioned I’m going shopping, it would ask nice shopping or food shopping? I found it entertaining.”

Bots Easing the Administrative Burden on Medical Professionals

The trial, which has recently concluded its first phase, is one of the ways in which progress in artificial intelligence are being taken up in healthcare.

Digital health company Healthily partnered with St Vincent’s regarding the program to use its advanced AI system to offer social interaction, along with an opportunity for elderly recipients to log any health issues or issues for a staff member to address.

Dean Jones, head of the home care division, says the service under evaluation is not a substitute for any face to face interactions.

“Recipients continue to get a regular personal visit, but in between visits … the [AI] system enables a routine call, which can then flag any possible issues to either our team or a client’s family,” Jones notes.

Dr Tina Campbell, the managing director of Healthily, says there haven’t been any negative events reported from the pilot program.

Healthily employs advanced AI “with strict safety protocols” to ensure the conversation is secure and mechanisms are in place to respond to critical medical problems quickly, Campbell states. For example, if a client is reporting chest pains, it would be alerted to the care team and the call ended so the person could dial triple zero.

She believes AI has an significant part given significant workforce challenges throughout the medical industry.

“The benefit very safely, using such systems, is reduce the administrative load on the workforce so trained clinicians can focus on performing the duties that they specialize in,” she comments.

AI Not as New as Often Believed

Prof Enrico Coiera, the co-founder of the national AI health alliance, says established types of AI have been a standard part of medicine for a considerable period, frequently in “administrative functions” such as interpreting medical images, cardiograms and lab reports.

“Any computer program that carries out a task that requires judgment in certain aspects is artificial intelligence, regardless of how it achieves that,” states Coiera, who is additionally the head of the health informatics center at Macquarie University.

“If you go the imaging department, medical imaging center or diagnostic laboratory, you’ll see software in machines performing these tasks.”

Over the past decade, advanced versions of artificial intelligence known as “deep learning” – an algorithmic approach that allows algorithms to analyze extensive datasets – have been used to interpret diagnostic scans and improve diagnosis, Coiera notes.

Recently, a screening service became the nation's pioneering public health initiative to introduce machine reading technology to support radiologists in reviewing a specific set of breast scans.

These represent specialized tools that continue to need a specialist doctor to interpret the findings they could indicate, and the responsibility for a clinical judgment rests with the healthcare provider, Coiera says.

AI’s Role in Early Disease Detection

A research center in Melbourne has been collaborating with scientists from a UK university who pioneered AI methods to detect neurological lesions known as focal cortical dysplasias from brain scans.

These abnormalities cause epileptic episodes that crequently cannot be controlled with medication, meaning surgical intervention to remove them becomes the sole option. However, the procedure can only be performed if the doctors can locate the affected area.

A study published this week in the journal Epilepsia, a group from the institute, led by specialist Emma Macdonald-Laurs, showed their “AI epilepsy detective” could identify the abnormalities in up to 94% of cases from advanced imaging in a specific form of the lesions that have traditionally been missed in more than half of patients (60%).

The system was developed using the scans of 54 patients and then evaluated with pediatric cases and adult patients. Among the youngsters, twelve underwent operations and eleven became free of seizures.

This technology employs AI algorithms comparable with the mammography analysis – highlighting suspicious areas, which are subsequently reviewed by specialists “speeding up the process to reach a conclusion,” Macdonald-Laurs says.

She stresses the researchers are still in the “early phases” of the project, with a additional research necessary to advance the tool toward clinical implementation.

A leading neurologist, a neurologist who was not involved in the research, says modern imaging now generate such vast quantities of detailed information that it is challenging for a person to review it thoroughly. Thus for clinicians the difficulty of locating these abnormalities was like “identifying the needle in the haystack.”

“This illustrates of how artificial intelligence can assist clinicians in making earlier, more accurate diagnoses, and has the potential to improve operation opportunities and outcomes for kids with treatment-resistant seizures,” the professor says.

Illness Identification in the Years Ahead

Dr Stefan Buttigieg, the deputy head of the international body's digital health and artificial intelligence section, says deep neural networks are also helping to monitor and predict disease outbreaks.

Buttigieg, who presented recently at the Public Health of Australia’s conference in Wollongong, gave as an example a tech firm, a company set up by infectious disease specialists and which was one of the first organisations to identify the coronavirus pandemic.

Content-creating AI is a additional branch of machine learning, in which the system can produce original material using existing information. These uses in medicine encompass tools such as Healthily’s AI voice bot as well as the automated note-takers doctors and allied health professionals are increasingly using.

Dr Michael Wright, the president of the national GP body, reports family doctors have been adopting digital assistants, which captures the appointment and converts it to a medical summary that can be added to the patient record.

The president says the primary advantage of the scribes is that it enhances the standard of the communication between the doctor and patient.

Dr Danielle McMullen, the president of the Australian Medical Association, concurs that AI note-takers are assisting doctors manage schedules and says artificial intelligence also has the potential to help doctors avoid duplication of tests and imaging for their clients, if the {promised digitisation|planned digitalization