Capturing the benefits of AI in healthcare for Aotearoa New Zealand

This report was requested by Prime Minister Hipkins in 2023 and was produced at pace for delivery of draft recommendations ahead of the 2023 election (terms of reference can be found in the full report). With a focus on healthcare delivery, this report was produced with Ian Town, the Chief Science Advisor to Manatū Hauora | Ministry of Health and co-chair of our expert panel.

Employing AI technologies in healthcare has far-reaching impacts. There are ways in which these technologies could enhance the healthcare system very soon, for example improving back-office operations or diagnostic support. The case studies featured in the full report offer a glimpse of current and near-future capabilities to start a conversation about how to introduce AI to our healthcare system.

Deploying the right AI technology has the potential to address some long-standing inequities in healthcare that will have positive impacts felt more widely than the healthcare system itself. Coupled with these opportunities are a series of complex ethical and legal issues. We understand that key health agencies are already planning work programmes which will go beyond the issues touched on in this report to ensure that AI is deployed effectively and safely in the health system. It is our hope that this report might support robust discussion amongst policy writers and decision makers to consider the best path to enable technology to support human care.

Deploying the right AI technology has the potential to address some long-standing inequities in healthcare that will have positive impacts felt more widely than the healthcare system itself.

The successful deployment of AI into our healthcare system will depend not just on the technology itself, but on the wider healthcare system and system settings that are crucial to underpin smooth implementation. This necessitates a thorough understanding of our landscape at present (spanning legislation, policy, infrastructure, data, research, and workforce) coupled with a clear vision and cross-sector agreement for the future of healthcare. We recognise how rapidly the AI technology landscape is likely to evolve. As such, we have limited our recommendations to a timespan of five years, acknowledging there will be a need to re-evaluate both the AI and healthcare landscapes on an ongoing basis.

We thank our amazing expert panel whose experiences span healthcare, academia, technology development, ethics, philosophy, tikanga Māori and governance. We are also grateful to our reference group, which included academics, industry experts, entrepreneurs, and government agencies from both national and international settings. Finally a huge thank you to the writing team for putting the collected thoughts in order.

Image: A painting of a futuristic nurse in rural New Zealand created using Stable Diffusion on huggingface.co