The Dutch Association of Hospitals (NVZ) and the Dutch Federation of University Medical Centres (NFU) have jointly developed a position paper entitled ‘AI in healthcare: accelerated and responsible scaling up’ (PDF).
NVZ chairman Ad Melkert and NFU vice chairman Bertine Lahuis(member of The Economic Board) presented the paper to Minister Fleur Agema of VWS in early October.
Opportunities
According to both organisations, AI offers many opportunities for the future of healthcare. Artificial intelligence can take over routine work and reporting and increase efficiency in healthcare. This, in turn, will help cope with labour market shortages while increasing healthcare capacity. And it can also raise quality, AI can improve diagnostics, support personalised patient treatments and improve communication with patients.
What needs to be done?
As the scale-up of AI is still slow at the moment, the organisations call for cooperation to remove barriers and introduce responsible application faster. Indeed, there are still some bumps to overcome. For instance, it is better to interpret and apply laws and regulations jointly at national level than to have each hospital deploy expensive expertise separately. The same goes for drawing up an ethical framework, the wide availability of standardised data, a validation infrastructure and funding.
Informing citizens, patients and healthcare professionals about AI in healthcare and its consequences can also be better worked out and implemented together.
Work agenda
NVZ and NFU therefore come up with a working agenda in the position paper. In it, they describe which actions are needed, who takes the lead in this and where the support of VWS cannot be missed. This working agenda is about jointly choosing a direction, setting priorities, applying focus, making targeted investments, combining expertise and offering it nationally, and dividing and coordinating activities.
Read the position paper: AI in healthcare: accelerating and scaling up responsibly (PDF)
