A National Policy Roadmap for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare

Artificial Intelligence has benefits too big to ignore. Taking advantage of these benefits will however require a mature and co-ordinated national approach.

For Australia’s healthcare system to remain sustainable and resilient while delivering quality care, it must evolve to meet many new demands, including increasing disease complexity, treatment intensity, climate change and future pandemics. Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises us a pathway to creating this smarter, more adaptive health system. From interpretation of imaging and pathology, triage and resource allocation, clinical documentation, through to the personalisation of therapy, AI will be used both by consumers and clinicians and touch most aspects of the healthcare system.

AI is however also a major disrupter, presenting opportunities and threats across all industries. Australian governments must help industry exploit AI, and support healthcare services to be effective adopters of AI. However, doing so is complex and requires a multisectoral policy approach.

This National Policy Roadmap for AI in Healthcare (The Roadmap) delivers a policy agenda for AI in Healthcare. It delivers a critically needed co-ordinated national approach, with the aim of bringing Australia into line with comparable nations who have already made substantial progress in investment and adoption of AI.

The Roadmap lays the foundation for Australia to embrace the opportunities that AI brings to healthcare, and is designed to assist all levels of government, industry and civil society. It identifies current gaps in Australia’s capability to translate AI into effective and safe clinical services and provides guidance on key issues such as workforce, industry capability, implementation, regulation, and AI safety. It also acknowledges and builds on the extensive work already undertaken nationally and internationally.

The Australian Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare (AAAiH) released an earlier version of The Roadmap in 2021 after extensive community consultation and a national survey of 180 stakeholder organisations. During 2023, in the face of rapid technology advances such as generative AI, the AAAiH undertook further consultations and hosted a policy development workshop with representatives of over 30 peak organisations in August 2023, culminating in the present National Policy Roadmap.

The AAAiH has been supported in this endeavour by Macquarie University, the CSIRO Australian eHealth Research Centre, RMIT University, the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre, and the Australasian Institute of Digital Health.