Last week, Wednesday 22 July, saw the official launch of Don’t Walk. Run. AI in Healthcare. The 3rd National Policy Roadmap. There were 240 online attendees for the launch and 525 registered to access the Roadmap.
To create the Roadmap, we synthesised the detailed perspectives of over 90 Alliance member organisations. We are very thankful for the considered reflections you sent us and hope you can see your aspirations in the final product. Before launch, we sense-checked the emerging roadmap with over 20 focus groups and interviews with key thought leaders, state and federal government and its agencies.
In other words, creating the roadmap was a large task, taking nearly a year, and the end product is solidly evidence-based, built on the robust policy viewpoints of the Alliance membership and broader community.
Among its key recommendations, the Roadmap makes a strong call for leadership. We need a coherent national plan for AI adoption that is whole of sector and not just siloed in government agencies alone. The challenges ahead affect us all and require responses from us all, whether we come from industry, health services, government, academia or the broader community.
The Roadmap also highlights the critical need to develop governance processes and capabilities for managing AI, given its unique opportunities and risks. Governance is a shared responsibility, involving not just agencies like the TGA, Ahpra and the Commission for Safety and Quality. Some of the governance tasks are local and health service providers need support to take on this new set of responsibilities.
Australia also needs to develop sovereign AI capability, building sufficient technological independence, local expertise, infrastructure and governance to reduce reliance on international technology providers when that comes with sovereign risk.
The Roadmap also calls for investment in privacy-preserving AI technologies such as federated learning, enabling AI development without necessarily sharing raw patient data across institutions and for AI systems to be locally calibrated to Australian populations, services and health needs rather than relying on imported models.
To accelerate adoption, the Roadmap recommends national best-practice guidance on the procurement, implementation and operation of clinical AI, helping health services move beyond isolated pilots to large-scale deployment.
For consumers, it proposes a national AI-enabled ‘front door’ for healthcare, using AI to improve access to and navigation across services such as 1800 Medicare and My Aged Care. A related recommendation is to establish national “Beacon sites” which are health services that routinely offer full AI-enabled care, as a mechanism to develop and test national guidance, to build up a core of expertise that can then move out across the whole system.
The Roadmap recommends AI training for the healthcare workforce and the creation of a national Chief AI Officer training program to develop a new generation of leaders capable of driving the procurement, governance and implementation of AI across healthcare organisations.
The Roadmap further calls for major investment in AI research, including dedicated AI funding pathways through the NHMRC and MRFF and the establishment of one or more large-scale Centres of Research Excellence in Healthcare AI.
The reaction to the Roadmap has been extremely positive, with articles in Health Services Daily, Pulse+IT, Australian Ageing Agenda, Croakey Health Media, and Pulse, the Podcast. The commentary on LinkedIn has also been supportive, and the Alliance is thankful for that.
This 3rd Roadmap was supported by Macquarie University (MQ), the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre (DHCRC), the CSIRO E-health Research Centre, and RMIT.
With 28 recommendations over 8 priority areas, the Roadmap makes clear how much is still to be done. As the title suggests, the time for action is now, as the world is rapidly changing around us. “Don’t walk. Run!”
You can download a copy of the 3rd National Policy Roadmap for Healthcare AI here.
