Adopting AI in Australian Healthcare

I recently spent a couple of days at the Australasian Institute of Digital Health’s AI.Care conference in Brisbane. I came away equal parts energised and sobered. Energised, because there’s real momentum: AI is no longer a speculative future in healthcare. It’s already in the room. Sobered, because the biggest barriers to adoption aren’t technical. They’re human, organisational, legal, and cultural.

AI.Care’s framing was practical: move beyond hype, learn from real deployments, and figure out what it takes to go from pilot to scale. The stated themes ranged from adoption and governance to workforce, privacy, security, consumer trust, data sovereignty and the role of national collaboration in Australia’s approach to AI in care. In other words: not “what can the model do?” but “what does it take to make this safe, useful, and sustainable in real health systems?”