I recently chaired a panel on AI for the Australian College of Health Service Management (ACHSM) one day conference. We had such a brilliant panel of experienced speakers (Schellie-Jayne Price, Alex Jenkins, Lana Bell, & Charles Poulson) and the key takeaway for me was just get started!
AI is moving fast but you don’t need a 12-month strategy or a million dollar use case to begin your AI journey! You need to just get started!
Start to play with AI and become familiar with it. Use tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot or Gemini for tasks such as drafting, summarising, planning, or brainstorming. Get used to prompting. There are a million articles on teaching you how to prompt effectively to achieve the outputs you require! Practice, practice and practice some more!
Exploring AI is powerful but awareness of the risks is critical to its use in healthcare.
Risks include:
The panel talked about stealth AI. The addition of AI into products you already use in the organisation bypassing tech evaluation processes. Your best protection against stealth A is having staff aware of when they are interacting with AI and what to look out for!!
AI literacy includes knowing what can go wrong. The sooner you build that awareness, the safer and smarter your use will be. Get started on this now!
Just like you probably train your staff on cyber security, make AI training compulsory so that your workforce understands the risks. There are many organisations that have already developed AI awareness programs ensuring their workforce is familiar with their AI principles and the risks. The Digital Transformation Agency strongly recommends government agencies implement AI fundamentals training for all staff, regardless of role and has developed AI fundamentals training taking 20-30 mins to complete!
Don't wait for that big use case - start now. Your workforce is probably already using AI!
Grand strategies and AI roadmaps are tempting but the real question to ask is much smaller:
“What are the repetitive, low-value tasks slowing us down?”
“Where do people waste time or get stuck?”
Use these questions to find the right friction points. Then ask whether AI might help streamline, automate, or improve them.
But Before jumping to AI, still check: "Is AI the right / best solution to this problem?”
Sometimes process redesign, better integration, or simple automation is a better fit.
Don’t try to solve your biggest problems with your first AI project. Pick something small, clear, and low risk. Set short timelines. Make room to learn.
Even if it doesn’t succeed, a quick pilot will teach you more than six months of planning.
This builds on one of the key mantras in the PMI Cognitive Project Management in AI (CPMAI) certification I completed last year - "Think Big Start Small and iterate often!
This means having a clear vision of what AI could achieve for your organization. This can include long-term goals like improving patient outcomes, enhancing operational efficiency, or personalising care.
Rather than attempting a large scale AI deployment from the start (which often leads to failure), CPMAI encourages small, focused projects:
This reflects agile, lean startup, and CRISP-DM data science principles where you prove value early, learn from feedback, and build trust incrementally.
AI is not “build once and done.” You need cycles of:
This is essential for managing the uncertainty of AI systems, particularly those using machine learning, which are probabilistic and require tuning over time.
Even if you’re not planning to use AI or just experimenting, this is the one thing you should do now !
While many organisations do have mature risk management, IT governance, and procurement processes in place, AI introduces fundamentally different challenges and unpredictability that these existing processes don’t fully account for. You don’t need to build completely new processes and committees from scratch, but you do need to evolve these existing processes to handle AI use cases that will come forward!
So finally, you don’t need a massive AI strategy to start. You need to start, to build the right strategy.
So just get started on the points above. Learn by doing. Bring your people with you but stay grounded in clinical reality and don’t just react to the hype.
Are you just starting your AI journey in healthcare? What’s worked for you? What’s holding you back?
If you’re working on digital health innovation or exploring how to better connect your systems:
We’d love to learn more and explore how our team can support your vision.