September 14, 2026
AI is firmly on the agenda in Australian healthcare, but what does practical adoption really look like, and where is it adding value?
Those were some of the questions posed during the latest Talking HealthTech Community Expert Roundtable: “Healthcare AI in Australia: Moving from Experimentation to Impact”. Led by host Peter Birch (Talking HealthTech), the panel featured a rich cross-section of expertise across digital healthcare, including: Dr Christina Igasto (Director-General, Digital Canberra, ACT Government), John Sutherland (CDIO, Calvary Health Care) and our own Andy Canning (CTO and Managing Director, Equal Experts APAC).
Having helped organise the session, I watched along, expecting governance and guardrails to dominate the discussion, yet instead the audience-driven questioning took a different direction, with a greater focus on the goals of AI projects, including real-world examples of selecting the right use cases and co-designing solutions with clinicians.
Here are some of my key highlights from the discussion.
A dominant thread of the conversation is that AI healthcare tools must be designed with clinicians and patients from day one, with serious consideration of how it fits into the workflow and ways of working. When new tools are simply handed to busy frontline staff at the rollout stage, often with a directive to rapidly adopt them into their day-to-day work, these initiatives fail, and fail quickly.
Sustainable impact only happens when the end users, including administrative teams, doctors, nurses and other care professionals, are directly involved in shaping the tool, how it functions and how it can add value to their work.
Many organisations in Australian healthcare are feeling pressure to act quickly with AI and be seen to be using this new technology in some way. But AI is not the answer to everything. The panel emphasised that real value comes from identifying precise, high-priority challenges and analysing if AI could be a potential solution. For organisations that had seen success with AI, this was often in initiatives that helped alleviate some of the administrative burden, providing clinicians with more time to spend caring for patients and supporting families.
Real-world examples shared by the panel included:
Moving beyond AI proofs-of-concept, pilots and demos requires having a firm underlying foundation. Organisations cannot jump straight from crawling to sprinting without establishing the data pipelines, system interoperability, modern operating models and new team capabilities required to support AI adoption at scale. Without these essential fundamentals as well as effective governance in place, exciting AI plans and ideas can quickly fail, being abandoned before delivering any measurable impact.
One of the most thought-provoking and unexpected questions from the audience focused on how to evaluate AI performance within healthcare. Exploring this took into account how humans are inherently fallible. Clinicians experiencing fatigue, cognitive overload and administrative distractions on long shifts inevitably make mistakes. Yet we are often quick to criticise AI and dismiss the technology if it hallucinates or makes a similar error. Is it fair to hold technology to a standard of perfection?
Rather than demanding flawless execution from AI, the panel discussed how impact and value should be benchmarked against real-world clinical outcomes and baseline results. This also highlighted the importance of maintaining a human in the loop within healthcare AI, ensuring that the AI is not trusted blindly when making decisions, particularly in patient care.
The Talking HealthTech roundtable discussions directly reflected what we recently heard in our own research with more than 100 digital health leaders across Australia. Our report, AI by design in Australian healthcare, found that while AI ambitions are high, 62% of organisations rate themselves as just level 1 or 2 for overall AI maturity across technology, data, operating models and capabilities.
To help healthcare organisations bridge this gap between ambition and implementation at scale, Equal Experts is offering an AI Maturity Workshop. Designed specifically for health leaders, the workshop supports organisations to assess their current readiness, pinpoint high-impact use cases, and map out a practical implementation strategy.
Contact Equal Experts Australia to find out more about the workshop and how it could help your organisation address foundational gaps and build a clear, actionable roadmap toward long-term AI impact.
Ken Gallacher is a commercially savvy, delivery-focused digital executive with over 30 years’ experience leading high-impact transformations, both as a CIO and as a Partner at Big 4 consulting firms. Ken brings a wide range of industry experience across healthcare as well as financial services, government, media, education, manufacturing and retail sectors. Connect with Ken on LinkedIn.
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