KZN MEC urges doctors, hospitals to embrace AI as a partner in healthcare
KZN Health MEC Nomagugu Simelane urges healthcare professionals to embrace AI as a transformative partner in patient care.
Image: Kampus Production/pexels
KwaZulu-Natal Health MEC Nomagugu Simelane has called on the medical fraternity to embrace Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a partner in care and not to view it as a threat.
Simelane made the call during the recent launch of the South African Medical Association’s (SAMA) KZN provincial structure and AI interactive workshop in Durban, urging health professionals to consider how technology could transform patient care across the province.
“AI should not be seen as an enemy that will take away jobs. Rather, it should be viewed as a partner... a tool that can help doctors, nurses, and managers to be more efficient, accurate, and responsive,” she said.
She added that when used wisely, AI could “shorten diagnostic times, support early detection of diseases, improve hospital management systems, reduce human error, and free up healthcare workers to focus on the human side of care, which machines can never replicate.”
For Simelane, technology offers a potential lifeline in under-resourced rural areas: “Imagine a rural clinic where a nurse can, with the help of AI, detect a life-threatening condition early and save a life that might otherwise have been lost. That is the promise of this technology, and we need to embrace it.”
Her remarks come as private healthcare provider Netcare confirmed the nationwide deployment of an advanced machine learning algorithm in all its intensive care units, describing it as a first for South Africa.
Developed through years of international collaboration between Netcare, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, the University of KwaZulu-Natal, the Telehealth Competence Centre in Germany, the University of Minnesota, Emory University in the US, and South Africa’s DigitalOn Tech, the system provides predictions of patient risk of deterioration from common causes.
“The prediction algorithm uses automatically recorded real-time heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, and respiratory rate data to detect a person’s chance of deteriorating.
“This provides vital information that doctors can use to commence therapy much earlier, when such interventions tend to be most effective,” said Professor Reitze Rodseth, head of clinical data innovation and research at Netcare.
The technology, underpinned by an artificial neural network, analyses electronic information on patients’ vital signs and can anticipate deterioration up to ten hours in advance. Conditions such as heart failure, respiratory compromise, infection, sepsis, or acute cardiac arrhythmia can now be flagged before symptoms present.
Dr Richard Friedland, chief executive officer of Netcare, said the system has profound clinical value: “Crucially, this means that we are supporting doctors to identify this risk hours in advance and commence potentially lifesaving treatment much earlier — providing an opportunity to address this leading cause of clinical deterioration before it progresses.”