Australian healthcare spend can be stretched further through AI
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The news: Australia’s spend on healthcare is going to increase as the population ages, but spend can be stretched further through the use of digital technologies such as AI, according to new research from the Productivity Commission.
The numbers: The report found that spending on healthcare accounted for 10% of the country's GDP and this was going to increase as the population aged. The challenge would be to provide services more cheaply and efficiently without compromising on quality.
The commission said that quality-adjusted multifactor productivity grew by about 3% per year between 2011 to 2012 and 2017 to 2018 for the subset of diseases studied as part of the report, which together account for around one-third of healthcare expenditure. This growth was driven mostly by improvements in quality rather than reductions in cost.
Australia's healthcare productivity ranks third among 28 high-income countries, once behavioural and environmental risk factors and the age of populations are accounted for.
However, productivity commissioner Catherine de Fontenay said that Australia had the fourth highest rate of obesity in the world and the sixth highest level of alcohol consumption, which worsens population health and creates more work for the country's healthcare sector.
The context: The report noted that Australia's healthcare spend could be stretched further by reducing sizeable risk factors, such as obesity and alcohol consumption, as well as integrating digital technologies — including digital records, new models of remote care and new technologies such as AI — as they emerge.
This is the first time that the quality of Australia’s healthcare has been considered in an assessment of productivity. Previous research assessed the productivity of Australia's healthcare system by looking at how much it costs to provide a service, such as a visit to hospital, while the commission's latest report looks at how much it costs us to treat a particular disease and the outcomes of the treatment.
The report found that productivity growth was particularly strong for the treatment of cancers, likely due to the introduction of new cancer therapies in the 2010s. The commission said that this highlights the importance of quickly integrating new treatments as they emerge.
What they said: De Fontenay said: "Australia's healthcare spend is big and getting bigger, but we are seeing significant return on that investment through better health outcomes."
"Looking at the outcomes our system creates for patients provides a much truer picture of its productivity," she said. "A healthcare system that gets people in and out of hospital quickly and cheaply isn't much good if those patients aren't getting better."
The source: Productivity Commission media release
