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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2025-05-13 Daily Xml
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Medical Diagnosis, Artificial Intelligence

In reply to the Hon. F. PANGALLO ().6 February 2025).

The Hon. K.J. MAHER (Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Attorney-General, Minister for Industrial Relations and Public Sector, Special Minister of State): In response to questions one to three, the Minister for Health has advised:

SA Health has guidelines in place to ensure staff know how to use artificial intelligence (AI) technologies safely and in accordance with current policy. An advisory document was issued to SA Health employees on 28 November 2024 regarding the use of AI technologies. This advisory stated that SA Health employees must not input any personal information or any official government information that is not suitable for public consumption into publicly available AI tools. This is to ensure patient information is not made available via open source AI and to protect SA Health staff and patients from information being inadvertently released.

SA Health has established a data governance program and an AI governance working group that develops policies and procedures for the secure use of confidential patient data and emerging AI technologies. The AI governance working group also defines standards and processes to assess research and evidence based clinical projects, ensuring compliance and patient safety.

Within this governance framework, SA Health is actively working on solutions to allow clinicians to use generative AI tools within a secure environment to ensure that no confidential patient data leaves its system. This may include using AI for the generation of clinical summaries and letters, and scribing, within a safe, secure, and protected environment. This approach allows clinicians to leverage modern AI tools while mitigating the risk of data breaches. Any AI tools adopted by SA Health will be robustly tested and evaluated prior to being released for routine clinical use.

Additionally, SA Health is developing a clinician education program to inform staff about the benefits and risks of emerging technologies like generative AI, promoting safe and responsible use in clinical practice.

In response to question four, I am advised:

The Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO), Department of Treasury and Finance (DTF), has published the Guideline for the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Model Tools. The guideline is publicly available on DTF's website. The guidance applies to all public sector agencies and assists them in considering the safe usage of this technology in their agency.

The Crown Solicitor's Office have a use of generative artificial intelligence policy,which is reviewed every six months to keep in line with emerging technologies. The most recent version was approved on 16 April 2025. It restricts any use of generative AI technologies to executive-approved use of Microsoft 365 Copilot with commercial data protection enabled. Any outputs generated must not be used for any legal work without first independent checking of its accuracy and correctness.

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