Transform Gov - the digital government podcast

What happens when AI gives radiologists a second pair of eyes? Done well, it can help find disease earlier, ease the workload and free clinicians to spend more time with patients. But getting it into a hospital takes evidence, governance and a lot of people in the room. In this episode, we speak to Professor Nuala Healy, Chair of Radiology at RCSI and Consultant Radiologist at Beaumont Hospital, about getting AI tools into Irish hospitals, measuring whether they work and asking patients what they think.
The evidence is encouraging. A large Swedish trial of more than 100,000 women found a 29% increase in cancer detection and a 44% reduction in radiologists’ workload.

What you can take away and act on:
🔹 Start with the clinical question. Identify where the need is before you talk to vendors.
🔹 Bring every team into the room early. Clinical colleagues, the emergency department, procurement, IT, the imaging team and your data protection officer all have a part to play.
🔹 Measure outcomes from the start, and keep measuring. Track missed fractures, referrals and time in the emergency department, and be ready for an “awkward breakup” with an AI tool that isn’t working.
🔹 Keep a human in the loop. Nuala explains automation bias, why radiologists need to feel able to overrule the AI, and how to train junior radiologists to build their own judgement.
🔹 Ask patients, and tell them. Of about 3,500 people surveyed, 96% in the radiology study wanted to be told when AI is used in their care, and the EU AI Act now requires it.
🔹 Share the platform, not just the tool. Ireland’s national imaging system lets AI tools be plugged in centrally, rather than every hospital repeating the same governance process.

For civil servants and public sector leaders introducing AI into frontline services, this is a practical guide to getting it in safely, measuring it properly and keeping people in the loop.

Transform Gov is part of the Ireland eGovernment Awards, in partnership with Accenture.

#TransformGov #PublicSector #AI #Radiology #DigitalHealth
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Where does innovation in the public sector really come from? Rarely from technology first. In this episode Dr James O’Connell, Innovation Fellow with HSE Spark, talks to us about how frontline staff get support to spot problems, work with partners across the public sector and turn ideas into change.

Spark is the HSE’s frontline staff-led innovation programme, and Spark Fusion funds collaborations between the HSE and other public sector organisations, up to €95,000.

The response so far is strong: 228 people attended the recent Fusion workshop, and 772 consultants were involved in this year’s Innovation Fund for Consultants applications.

What you can take away and act on:
🔹 Start with the problem, not the solution. Examine the causes together as a group before you decide what to build.
🔹 Look beyond your own organisation. James describes two frontlines: the clinics and EDs, and the local authorities, schools and transport bodies that shape the conditions people live in.
🔹 Flatten the hierarchy. The best insights come from the frontline, so bring everyone to the table as equals.
🔹 Choose the right fund for your idea. Spark Seed supports early ideas up to €5,000, Spark Impact funds projects up to €90,000 and Spark Fusion up to €95,000, and there is a separate Innovation Fund for Consultants.
🔹 Make your case clearly when you apply. Describe the problem or opportunity, who it affects and who is on the team, and involve patients or the public at the problem-definition stage.
🔹 Remember it doesn’t have to be technology. Dementia training for the Gardaí, sun safety for lifeguards and a joint clinic all came from people working together.
🔹 Judge success beyond one project. Even when a pilot doesn’t scale, it can create an innovator for life.

Key dates: Spark Fusion applications close on 30 October. The Innovation Fund for Consultants opened on 5 October and closes on 25 March, with a pre-submission feedback stage until early January.

For civil servants and public sector leaders with a frontline idea, a cross-sector problem or a pilot that needs to scale, this is practical advice on where to start. Find out more about Spark at hse.ie/spark.

Transform Gov is part of the Ireland eGovernment Awards, in partnership with Accenture.

#TransformGov #PublicSector #Innovation #HSE #Healthcare
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Before AI can change healthcare, the record underneath it has to be right. In this episode, we speak with Helen Waters, Executive Vice President and COO of Meditech, about what Ireland needs to get right first as it moves towards a national electronic health record, and what 22 countries’ experience can teach us.

Meditech develops electronic health records. It has more than 30 years in healthcare IT, works in 22 countries and has been in Ireland for over 20 years.

What you can take away:
🔹 Start with the system of record, and decide the pace and the cost deliberately. Fast should mean agile, not reckless. Helen describes a rollout of 180 hospitals in under five years, made faster by standardising and allowing for regional preferences.
🔹 Standardise at the top and let regions adapt. Helen explains how HCA, which runs 180 US hospitals, sets national standards while allowing local variation.
🔹 Plan for affordability beyond day one. In the US, technology costs went up and never came down.
🔹 Insist on interoperability. The clinician making the next decision needs the data they need, whichever system holds it.
🔹 Put clinicians, finance and data teams at the table early. Helen gives an example of a maternity system where counting births proved difficult.
🔹 Use proven AI, such as ambient voice, and prove its value. Clinicians are wary of governments and vendors getting “drunk on the next technology”.

For civil servants and public sector leaders involved in health technology, this is practical advice on getting the foundations right.

Transform Gov is part of the Ireland eGovernment Awards, in partnership with Accenture.

#TransformGov #HealthTech #PublicSector #AI #DigitalHealth
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Every new policy asks people to do something differently, but training is often treated as a mere afterthough, taking place after rollout. So what if we flipped the process? What if we treated learning as an essential, so policy actually changes what happens on the ground?

In this episode, we speak with Gavin Woods, Managing Director of Aurion Learning, who has spent almost 26 years helping government departments, agencies and public bodies turn policy into practice through digital learning.

What you can take from this episode:
🔹 Bring learning into the room where the policy is written: The organisations that win awards for delivery plan training alongside the policy, not after it. One recent client saw 98% of its audience complete the compliance training required.
🔹 Check your own language, and ask your audience what they need: Teams working intensely on policy can become "a little bit obsessed with our own plans and our own language", using terms their audience doesn't understand.
🔹 Look beyond the tip of the iceberg: The people already engaged with you aren't your whole audience. Where you can't simply tell people to complete training, work out what's in it for them, and design for learning rather than just information sharing.
🔹 Ask who is accountable for the policy's success, not just who runs training: Heads of strategy, transformation and sector skills increasingly need to be part of the conversation.
🔹 Build a one-stop shop for AI upskilling: A learning portal with approved tools, internal guidance and colleague case studies helps turn "is this here to take my job?" into confidence.
🔹 Don't mistake speed for quality: "Fast and bad is still bad." Ask what people need to know, what's difficult and what they ask most often, then pick the right format, from e-learning to a printable job aid.

🎧 Transform Gov is part of the Ireland eGovernment Awards, brought to you in partnership with Accenture.

#TransformGov #PublicSector #Learning #PolicyImplementation #AI
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Recorded live at the All-Ireland Clinical AI Congress in Belfield, this episode features Dr Amrita Kumar, Radiology and AI Clinical Lead at Medica and a consultant breast radiologist who has built hospital-wide AI implementation from scratch — first in the NHS, now in the UAE.

What you can take from this episode:
🔹 Don't rush to a pilot — set up governance first. Dr Kumar discovered her hospital's departments were each adopting AI in isolation; the fix was getting every stakeholder (data governance, IT, digital, clinical teams) around one table from the start, not cascading through them one by one.
🔹 Build a short, clear pitch for executive buy-in — and let leadership do the cascading. A five-slide deck and one meeting with her CEO was enough to unlock introductions to every other stakeholder needed.
🔹 Secure funding through research partnerships before real-world rollout. Partnering on national research projects built internal infrastructure and expertise while bringing in funding, well before any live implementation began.
🔹 Design one consistent governance and evaluation framework, even across different vendors and workflows. The same setup, evaluation, and monitoring approach was successfully scaled across five hospitals using different AI tools for different tasks.
🔹 Watch for automation bias, and build in permanent checks. Less experienced clinicians' agreement with AI shifted measurably over time — the fix includes periodic "no AI" reporting sessions and training staff to read confidence scores, not just flagged regions.
🔹 Know where AI genuinely helps today. With roughly 90% of scans normal, AI's clearest current value is confidently triaging those cases so limited specialist time goes to the 10% that need it.

🎧 Transform Gov is part of the Ireland eGovernment Awards, brought to you in partnership with Accenture.
📅 The Ireland eGovernment Awards and Leadership Summit take place 24 September at O'Reilly Hall, UCD. Find out more at digitalgovawards.com
#TransformGov #AI #Healthcare #DigitalTransformation #PublicSector
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