The national telehealth platform is working to predict where AI-using patients will be in 12 months’ timing, with the aim of being there waiting for them.
Healthdirect Australia – just weeks away from becoming 1800 MEDICARE – is working to transform itself into an organisation that can continue to serve the patients it does on a day-to-day basis while looking to meet the needs of patients 12 months down the track in an environment of exponential demand growth.
Speaking at the AIDH’s AI.Care conference in Brisbane this week, Healthdirect CEO Bettina McMahon told delegates the increasing use of conversational AI agents such as ChatGPT for medical questions was a notable flag for the future.
“In Healthdirect, we deal with really high volumes,” she said.
“It’s 24/7 on both the phone line and technology. We have a high-reliability service, which needs very high levels of resilience and security to maintain the trust we have in Australians to use our service.
“That is the bread and butter of what we need to do.
“Alongside that, we’re looking to the future – how are Australians going to be consuming health information into the future? How are we going to be relevant?
“We’re thinking about how consumers use their AI conversational agents. People will be using those agents more than search engines to ask questions about their symptoms, and we’re already seeing data on people who are taking up things like ChatGPT.
“Seventy percent of users are saying that they’re using it for health queries, despite the terms of reference of those models not allowing for that.
“It’s happened,” she said. “People are using it.
“So we’re thinking about consumers coming to the internet for information in that way. How do we elevate our content so those agents are using us?”
As reported by Health Services Daily in September, Healthdirect has set up a five-person transformation unit in the wake of struggling to set up a real-time translation service, the delivery of which has now been delayed until January.
“This is something that we’ve struggled with the most – how do we bring that leadership mindset into execution of the strategy in a way that doesn’t compromise security, quality, resilience and reliability?” said Ms McMahon.
“We’ve tried doing it using our usual processes, but we haven’t been making progress as quickly as we need to.
“So we’re changing some structures internally. We’ve established what we call a transformation office. It’s only five people but this office is charged with actually determining what are the projects that we accelerate? Which ones do we trial? How do we exit them quickly if they’re not delivering the sort of expectations at each step that we want? And then how do we scale that into the future?”
Healthdirect was looking at making “bets on the future”, she said.
“Bets on the future are just strategies, the things that you think are going to happen, to better position your organisation,” she said.
“We’re trialling lots of different things with new technologies like model, context, protocols, different use of agentic AI. But it’s not for the purpose of that.
“It’s for, how do we solve the problem of where will the consumers be [in 12 months’ time], and how do we make sure we’re there when they are.”
Healthdirect began work on the real-time interpreter service two years ago, Ms McMahon told TMR.
“Initially the quality wasn’t good enough. So we waited until the technology improved,” she said.
“We then, more recently, went to market. There were lots of responses, and we’ve trialled three of them.
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“We had some challenges in the way the technology worked anyway, with the rest of our stack, starting with the written content.
“We were planning to go live with that before Christmas, but we’ve decided to dial up the manual checks on that in post-market surveillance.
“So what will happen is, once the consumer translates it, we will save a copy in our archives so that we can go back later to see what was actually translated. And we want to have almost all of those manually verified by human translator to begin with.
“So for that reason, we’ve decided to our vendor hasn’t got capacity before Christmas, so we’re delaying up to the back end of January to make sure that’s done.
“We think that’s a safer option to give us more confidence in the translating tool and to get more feedback from consumers as well, and then to look at moving along.”
The Australian Government announced today it was establishing an Australian Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute (AISI) to respond to AI-related risks and harms.
According to a statement released by the federal Department of Industry, Science and Resources, the AISI would provide trusted, expert capability to monitor, test and share information on emerging AI technologies, risks and harms.
Its work will include:
- helping government keep pace with rapid developments in AI technologies, dynamically addressing emerging risks and harms;
- enhancing our understanding of technical developments in advanced AI and potential impacts;
- serving as a central hub to share insights and support coordinated government action;
- giving guidance on AI opportunity, risk and safety for businesses, government and the public through established channels including the National AI Centre (NAIC); and
- supporting Australia’s commitments under international AI safety agreements.
Its work will complement existing legal and regulatory frameworks that already protect Australians’ rights and safety. The AISI will become operational in early 2026.
The Australasian Institute of Digital Health’s AI.Care conference is being held in Brisbane on Monday 24 November and Tuesday 25 November.
