Not just AI: The future of healthcare needs a reinvention of care delivery

Two of Accenture’s healthcare leaders give us their views on the future of health work and the new human + machine partnership.

The law of supply and demand can seem harsh, particularly when it comes to healthcare.

“It’s an issue of demographics,” explains Marko Rauhala, Managing Director, Health and Public Services Nordics at Accenture. “Our population is aging and needs more healthcare services, but we already have a labour shortage. In Finland alone we have 20,000 unfilled nursing jobs.”

The issue is only going to get worse. In some countries the wait for elective procedures is becoming alarmingly long. Attempts to increase the supply of healthcare workers and lower the demand for healthcare are inadequate. Can technology help?

“IT has not helped healthcare productivity,” Rauhala warns. “Technology has been successful in increasing safety and helping decision-making, but now staff have to spend time capturing and structuring data. Nurses might spend 50 per cent of their work reading, typing or telling. But AI can help in tasks like this.”

There has been hope and hype about AI for decades, but it is only in the past few years that we have seen the real potential of generative AI (GenAI). This can create text, images or other media in response to prompts, as made famous by systems like ChatGPT.

“GenAI can look at unstructured text and find structured concepts,” explains Kaveh Safavi, Senior Managing Director, Global Health Accenture. “It could be told to listen to a conversation between doctor and patient and save the important information so the doctor doesn’t have to type it into the system.”

Conceivably, GenAI could generate new images like X-ray or MRIs, suggest personalised treatments or help with medical research. It learns from large, evolving amounts of data and generates new content, so it could have many applications.

There are other forms of technology that can help the future of healthcare. Data entry can be automated and robots can assist workers with demanding physical tasks, for example. But don’t be fooled: this is not as simple as it sounds.

“People’s brains need to rest,” Safavi continues. “We can’t take away every other task so a surgeon performs surgeries for twelve hours straight, because they will get cognitive fatigue. We can’t simply automate all the simple, easy jobs because people need them too. Instead, we need to rethink how humans and machines work together.”

Instead of simply adding more technology, what healthcare needs is to reinvent care delivery. Work must be remodelled with a human + machine mindset. At the heart of this is “hybrid work”, a better approach for humans and machines to work together. Healthcare staff will need new skills to get the most out of new technologies like GenAI.

“So many healthcare workers report they are unhappy with their jobs,” says Safavi. “If we transform work correctly we will give them better work experiences and make them happier, healthier and more productive. The future we want is not just a more efficient healthcare system, but better cared-for patients and happier staff.” |

Find out more at www.accenture.com/health