Due to risks involved in the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in health care, Safer Care Victoria and the Department of Health have given guidance on how and when GenAI may be used, which Monash Health has chosen to adopt as current policy.
In simple terms, our current guidance is that GenAI is not to be used for clinical care and only used cautiously in non-clinical work in health care.
What is GenAI?
Artificial Intelligence has been used in healthcare for many years in a regulated manner (e.g., radiology), but technology has rapidly advanced in the past 18 months. In particular, there has been a huge leap forward in GenAI.
GenAI describes models or algorithms that can create completely new content (text, images, data, etc.), using the dataset it was trained on. GenAI has become publicly available and very readily accessible to all of us – with ChatGPT and Bard being the most well-known and widely used examples in day-to-day life.
GenAI has great potential, but there are also significant risks if not used in a careful manner in healthcare.
The risks of GenAI
- Privacy and security cannot be maintained when inputting information into an application external to Monash Health.
- Mostly untested in healthcare so potential risks are yet to be identified.
- Incorrect information or AI ‘hallucinations’ where a response is generated containing false or misleading information presented as fact.
- Bias can occur when the underlying source data contains information that is biased, incomplete, or discriminatory, creating potential for results that perpetuate inequality.
What is Monash Health doing to move towards enabling safe use of GenAI?
We are working closely with Safer Care Victoria and the Department of Health to shape policy, while developing our own practical approaches to GenAI.
These include:
- Developing an AI Framework to document Monash Health’s approved AI processes.
- Defining an AI governance structure to make sure we’re adhering to the framework.
- Creating an AI register so we have a list of all AI used at Monash Health.
- Starting the process of developing our own ‘in-house ChatGPT’ available for our people to use (e.g., Monash Health hosted Copilot within M365)
Read the Generative AI advice from Safer Care Victoria for additional information.
Approved by Associate Professor Michael Franco, Executive Director, Digital Health