The AMA has called out the government for spruiking its commitment to maximising the benefits of AI while making little progress in actualising those benefits.
Doctors’ advocacy group, the Australian Medical Association wants to see wider use of artificial intelligence in healthcare – albeit with certain mandatory obligations attached – urging the government to get legislating before Australia falls behind.
In a report released today, the AMA pointed to Europe’s approach to AI regulation, where higher risk AI systems, like self-driving cars, come with more stringent oversight.
“While Australia is committed to maximising the benefits of AI, progress in actualising this commitment has been limited,” the AMA report said.
“The government should consider making certain obligations mandatory, following the example set by comparable regions, such as the EU.”
HealthDirect CEO Bettina McMahon told HSD that Australia risked getting left behind if it spent too long thoroughly investigating AI.
“These [philosophical questions are] things you could spend forever investigating,” she said.
“… AI is already being used in healthcare; the horse has bolted.
“We can’t start thinking about and investigating surveillance and privacy before we apply it, because it’s already there.”
Ms McMahon said that, while these tools were not without issues, a more prudent approach may be to understand how they are currently being used before applying new regulations.
“We need to find a way to better understand how it is being used, because at the moment it’s all shadow IT,” she said.
The AMA report comes just weeks after the TGA flagged that it would be conducting a review of AI-powered scribes in healthcare settings to determine whether they should be considered medical devices and, if so, whether they meet existing regulatory requirements.
Despite AI scribes being one of the more common AI integrations into practice, the AMA report did not mention the technology.
Instead, the report pulled out specific health AI use cases like analysis of scans to detect lung cancer and heart disease, personalised guidance on medication management and staff rostering.
“There’s been lots of focus on AI scribes, because it’s a tangible thing that lots of our member doctors are using and that patients are hearing about,” AMA president Dr Danielle McMullen told Health Services Daily.
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“But AI is and could be much broader than that, and it’s important that doctors and the general public do have an awareness of where could AI add value [and] what sort of guardrails we need in place to make sure that there’s safe and appropriate use of AI.”
The report also called for “the philosophical challenge of human judgement versus AI systems” to be thoroughly investigated before its application in healthcare.
At the same time, Dr McMullen acknowledged that while regulation is slow, technology improves rapidly.
She spoke of the need to take a balanced approach to care.
“Patients are already using some of these tools, and so this isn’t a looming concept,” she told HSD.
“This is here and now – patients are already actively using completely unregulated tools … to get health advice,
“While there’s great potential in supporting healthcare through AI tools, we need to make sure that questions like safety and accountability are clear from our perspective.”