A lot of attention is given to AI’s potential in clinical settings, moving us toward real-time, hyper-personalised care plans powered by advanced diagnostics, predictive analytics, and even AI-assisted robotic surgery.
Right now, though, its most significant day-to-day impact in healthcare is going to be behind the scenes, in the back office. The industry continues to face mounting pressures such as clinician burnout, rising costs, and sustainability concerns, and AI could be key to solving the problem.
Ethical and transparent implementation is key to balancing innovation with patient trust. Let’s take a look at some of the ways AI is transforming healthcare.
Saving clinicians’ time for more important tasks
Administration tasks comprise 20–50% of primary care physician’s work, leading to widespread dissatisfaction and burnout. AI-driven automation is ideally placed to take on time-consuming duties like data entry, record processing and claim authorisations.
For example, an organisation providing professional assistance via a personalised plan of treatment to meet clinical and home support goals, used a paper-based forms system to track in-home work by employees. The forms were manually entered and stored.
While affordable and senior-friendly, the system requires accurate documentation for legal and regulatory compliance. Backlogs often led to the need for extra staff, and the manual system made it harder to meet regulatory standards and maintain ISO 9001 certification, which demands strict control over document versions.
Now, using AI-powered intelligent document processing (IDP) tools, they scan stacks of documents to identify and digitise specific form-based information and send it directly to other business systems, saving a full day per week of administration time.
Process intelligence will be crucial for optimising workflows
Process intelligence (PI) uses data from a company’s own systems to analyse and improve how it operates, helping to find patterns and make things run more efficiently. A strong PI system can help healthcare providers better manage the details of patient care workflows.
Even minor changes in operations can translate into significant impacts on costs and clinicians’ time. To counteract this, PI can be used to discover how processes, employees and technology intersect, and plan around bottlenecks and problems.
Healthcare administrators can address pain points to increase efficiency, reduce costs and provide a better experience for staff and patients. Having an overview of all the links in the workflow chain can help prevent undesirable outcomes, and keeps technology working for healthcare providers, patients and staff, rather than just the bottom line.
Chris O’Brien Lifehouse
When paired with human oversight, AI can unlock valuable insights from untapped data like handwritten notes, accelerating care delivery and enhancing the patient experience.
Whether supporting emergency room staff or appointment schedulers, specialised AI adapts to a variety of workflows, easing the burden on healthcare professionals and allowing them to maintain their human touch with patients.
At Chris O’Brien Lifehouse, one of Australia’s leading cancer treatment and research facilities, over 100 projects are underway at any time for its almost 60,000 patients every year. With cancer patients often staying 90 days or more, paperwork would quickly pile up, and staff had to manually track their bulky physical files. Doctors struggled to find key information needed for holistic care.
The organisation needed a way to digitise its large backlog of documents, whilst maintaining a high level of accuracy so that no patient information was lost or incomplete. AI-powered IDP was able to eliminate 80% of paper records.
Using document AI gave clinicians faster access to a patient’s complete medical history, allowing for higher quality delivery of care while at the same time avoiding paper copies has saved $50,000+ per year. It also reduced burnout for medical records staff, who were able to add value elsewhere.
Optimise sustainability efforts in hospitals
World Economic Forum research reveals that hospitals produce an average of 50 petabytes – or 50 million gigabytes – of data per year. This includes everything from information from clinical notes to lab tests, medical images, sensor readings, and operational and financial data, with as much as 97% going unused.
The large volume of healthcare data plays a significant role in greenhouse gas emissions. With climate change an ongoing concern, healthcare organisations are actively looking for more sustainable practices. Although AI can be energy-intensive, it also holds promise as part of the solution.
AI can efficiently process large datasets to uncover ways to optimise energy use, helping reduce the environmental footprint of data storage and transmission. This drives both sustainability and greater energy efficiency across the industry.
For AI to truly help it needs to be guided by clear rules and a strong sense of ethics, so that technology and people can work together to deliver better care for patients. By combining new technology with core human values, the healthcare industry can build a future where innovation and care go hand-in-hand.
