AI in Healthcare: From Strategy to Pilots to Implementation

Problem-Driven Innovation

Wencke van der Meijden is the director of Novicare, an organization founded sixteen years ago with a dream: to provide older adults and people with intellectual disabilities with ongoing access to healthcare. This strong mission has enabled the organization to now provide treatments—with a staff of about 300—to some sixty-five institutions throughout the Netherlands.

Novicare aims to be a trailblazer and wants to continually help its practitioners implement improvements, Innovations, and new approaches. This can be achieved by reorganizing tasks, but also through technological innovation. To that end, the company hired a clinical technologist last year who specializes in RPA and AI—which stand for robotic process automation and artificial intelligence. “I’m not an AI expert myself, but I’ll share how we at Novicare try to facilitate innovation and AI as effectively as possible. One advantage we have as an organization is that change is in our DNA.”

Novicare’s objectives are to use our limited treatment capacity to help as many clients as possible in the best way we can. Working smarter is key to this, because we know that any time we no longer need to spend on a particular facility can be used to treat clients elsewhere.

Novicare focuses primarily on making healthcare accessible, which means the organization aims to help as many people as possible. AI can play a role in this by allowing practitioners to spend less time on administrative tasks, for example, and thus devote more time to clients. This must be done with the necessary caution, particularly given the sensitive nature of the data.

The organization has opted for an innovation approach that takes the problem as its starting point. The needs of clients and practitioners serve as the starting point. This approach is preferred over Innovation that starts with the solution. After all, if you don’t perceive a problem, you may be able to propose a solution, but it will likely have little or no added value.

To stay on top of opportunities presented by AI and RPA, the clinical technologist participates in nearly all projects to examine the problem from the perspective of his area of expertise. He focuses on solutions for issues that clinicians perceive as problems, such as collecting all relevant data and making records searchable. “When clients are transferred from home to the facility, responsibility is transferred from the primary care physician to the treating physician on site. You want that admission to go as smoothly as possible for everyone and to be able to welcome a new client in the best possible way. Insufficient insight and incomplete data create a lot of extra work. Often, healthcare providers spend as much as four hours preparing for an admission. If you can find a solution for that, it’s much more interesting.” Our RPA and AI clinical technologist is currently working on making the medical records—which arrive as unreadable PDFs—searchable. And the advantage of readable text is that you can then search it very specifically using smart “prompts.” For example, you can look up a client’s medical history, ongoing treatments with a specialist at the hospital, or even their life story as a basis for the intake interview.

And because both the clinical technologist and various practitioners are involved in such a project, there is learning about working with new techniques, about creating prompts, and about becoming “familiar” with these new ways of working.

That’s just one example of the initiatives he’s involved in; there are many more. Practitioners are very interested in the new AI initiatives, Van der Meijden explains. Of course, it takes some getting used to, but it starts with curiosity. “At a recent conference, 100% of our practitioners signed up for a workshop on AI & Robotics, even though there were other workshops with equally interesting content.” “They understand each other, which helps build support more quickly.”

She also isn’t worried that AI applications will eventually make the work of healthcare providers obsolete. “We know that our mission ultimately generates social value. And there’s plenty of work to go around. For every hour we manage to free up, we can take on something else—something even more valuable.”

“For every hour we free up, we can take on something else—something even more valuable” – Wencke van der Meijden

AI in healthcare requires collaboration, strategy, and execution

AI is still often used simply to apply a quick fix and solve problems. But AI actually offers the opportunity to implement fundamental changes. And that is exactly what the Healthcare sector needs, because the problems it faces are enormous. Costs continue to rise because, while innovations are being implemented, existing treatments and processes never go away. On top of that, we’ll be facing a double aging population in the near future. The demand for healthcare continues to rise, while the number of people working in healthcare is declining as many employees are nearing retirement themselves.

It’s not that the healthcare sector fails to recognize the potential of AI. There are countless initiatives. However, many of them die a premature death, and only a small fraction come to fruition. The most successful initiatives turn out to be embedded in collaborative partnerships. Not only because it’s useful to pool technical expertise—since there’s a severe shortage of technicians with knowledge of the medical sector—but also because the frontrunners in AI place a high priority on stakeholder management. At the same time, AI itself will undoubtedly accelerate progress, as it won’t be long before self-learning systems make their debut.

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