Clinicians across Bayside Health Service are spending less time on paperwork and more time with patients thanks to a new AI-enabled documentation tool, part of the largest deployment of artificial intelligence in Australia's public health system to date.

Redland Hospital Specialist in Emergency Medicine Dr Theo Meyer said the new technology was saving hours of paperwork.

“My experience has been that it gives me more time with patients and doing clinical work, not paperwork,” he said. “Seeing patients, treating them and looking after them.”

The AI-enabled documentation tool helps clinicians capture and structure information from patient consultations, supporting the creation of clear and consistent clinical notes.

“It completely cognitively offloads that extra paperwork, and you can focus more on the patient,” Dr Meyer said. “The system creates a good document framework which I’ll read through, check, make some amendments and copy across to our medical record keeping system.

“With the more complex cases, paperwork may have taken 20 to 40 minutes, artificial intelligence has easily reduced that timeframe to five minutes of review and enhancement.

“Anything we can do to improve the patient journey, to reduce some of those steps that take time, I think it’s a great thing.”

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