Public healthcare needs a national development roadmap

TEXT: TIMO MANSIKKA-AHO

Generative AI evolves at a fast pace, but reaping the benefits makes painfully slow progress. While new ways to streamline operations, generate savings and make work more rewarding keep appearing, the eagerness to put those opportunities to use remain, to say the least, varied. Organizations lack either the resources to test how generative AI can best impact business operations, or the ability to lead the inevitable change that adopting new practices includes.

The first step for leaders is to understand that in the very near future, AI-infused technology will not only run the organization’s IT operations. It will run the work itself.

“Most of all, the change in workplace is a matter of leadership, and this means that the leaders must set their focus on the potential of generative AI”, says Marko Rauhala, Managing Director, Health & Public Sector at Accenture Finland. “Not in the sense of learning technical details, but in the sense of understanding why AI is important to us, and how it transforms our business.”

Many still ponder, which tasks should be moved over to AI, which ones should remain with people, and which ones should be taken care of together. Rauhala points out that it all begins with the willingness to continuously learn more.

“There is no knowing where the greatest opportunities lie. Leaders must have the courage to test various alternatives and gradually shift resources to the most potential directions.”

The keys to success are already out there, even when it comes to public healthcare. Value potential, cost savings, quality improvement, customer satisfaction and shortfall of resources are examples of challenges that even by themselves are almost insurmountable these days.

Not so if the potential would be even partially utilized. According to Accenture’s global research, up to 40 % of tasks in healthcare can be automatized through AI.

Kanta-Häme blazes the trail of AI utilization in wellbeing services counties

In the wellbeing services county of Kanta-Häme in Finland, it has been calculated that automation can contribute to substantial savings in working costs. For doctors, the potential is 22 %, for nurses 20 % and for administration and back-office personnel 34 %.

Monetarily, this adds up to the annual savings of 15 million euros.

Toni Suihko, Chief Development and Information Officer at Wellbeing Services County of Kanta-Häme, points out that implementing generative AI is not only about cutting costs. Deep down lies the main challenge of being able to provide sufficient care for everyone, inevitably with fewer people.

“In the near future, 20 % of healthcare professionals will retire, with no such amount available to replace them. At the same time, due to aging, longer lifetime expectancy and other issues, the need for healthcare services will increase by 10 %. Concrete tools and new operation models are mandatory to discover and implement.”

To lower the threshold of turning good ideas into tangible action, Suihko suggests sharing best practices and development work that has already been done between wellbeing services counties. As the preparedness levels vary quite a bit, learning form others is a good way to start testing how certain ideas and models would apply to us.

At best, that might lead to a collaboration framework that would even include government funding. A clear, common roadmap about how AI will be developed in a harmonious way would help even the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health to steer the available funds to where they matter the most. |

Read more at accenture.com/fi-en