Last week, more than 150 founders, clinicians, investors, regulators and health system leaders came together in Melbourne for our biggest and boldest ANDHealth Unfiltered yet!

The program was deliberately structured to move from the macro to the specific: from industry-wide transformation down to the practical realities of evidence, regulation and frontline deployment.

Three keynotes anchored that arc, covering the ethics of AI in drug development, what it really looks like when a major private health insurer puts AI to work for its members, and the hard-won lessons of deploying AI across global health systems.

Almost every session came back to one core tenet – trust is the key that will unlock the AI transformation of health.

Couldn’t join us on the day? Read on for insights from our three keynote speakers.

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AI in Drug Development: The Ethical Imperative

In our first keynote of the day, Dr Craig Rayner AM, Co-Founder and CEO of Oktopi, posited that AI in drug development is no longer optional, but the ethics are non-negotiable.

Developing a medicine is a long, complex and highly regulated process. It can take years and billions of dollars to develop a single medicine – and during that time, patients are waiting. Not using AI to speed up drug development would be doing the ecosystem a disservice, but ethical and responsible use is critical.

Scaling the process through AI is already underway, and it's the easier win. The harder, more valuable opportunity is scaling human creativity and judgement – without breaking what makes them work.

The aim should be to use AI to elevate team creativity and build capability without dependency. Junior expertise must be protected, not quietly designed out of the system, as today’s novices become tomorrow’s experts.

And with a patient impacted by every decision, trust must be demonstrable to a regulator and defensible to a board, and human accountability and decision traceability are required every step of the way.

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How Health Insurers are Using AI for Better Outcomes

Dr Paul Eleftheriou, Group Chief Medical Officer at Medibank, brought the conversation down to the frontline reality of a major private health insurer already putting AI to work.

His keynote offered more guiding principles for AI transformation: get genuinely obsessed with the problem before reaching for a solution, define outcomes rather than settling for outputs, and stay patient with iteration.

Across the health insurance sector, he sees AI showing up wherever friction slows people down – speeding up claims decisions, helping people navigate a fragmented health system, and making prevention feel less like a chore and more like something people stick with.

Global examples illustrated that this can be done responsibly, with workflows tested before scaling, consent and clinician oversight built in from the start, and outcomes shared openly so the lessons don't stay siloed.

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Global Adoption and Lessons from Deployment: UK, ANZ and Beyond

Drawing on decades of global digital health deployment experience, Kate Quirke, CEO of Alcidion, made a critical argument: the real differentiator in health AI isn't the algorithm, it's whether the underlying data can be trusted.

Alcidion's digital health platform, Miya Precision, provides clinical decision support and patient flow technology to more than 400 hospitals across Australia, New Zealand and the UK, giving Kate insight into how vastly different health systems are approaching the same technology.

Every health system faces the same pressure to lift productivity while managing rising demand and workforce shortages. The more persistent challenge isn't new capability; it's moving AI out of endless pilots into production and establishing who is accountable when it contributes to a decision.

Different health systems are tackling that challenge at very different speeds, shaped as much by funding and structure as by appetite for the technology itself.

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Different sectors, different scales, but a consistent thread ran through all three keynotes: the technology is rarely the hard part. Trust, governance and accountability are what determine whether AI in health delivers.

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Stay tuned – ANDHealth Unfiltered heads west next! Follow us on Humanitix to be notified when new events go live.

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ANDHealth Unfiltered: Not Just Another AI Summit was proudly supported by Major Partner Trinity Life Sciences, Supporting Partners Heidi Health and the Australian Centre for AI in Medical Innovation (ACAMI) and Media Partners Talking HealthTech and Pulse+IT.

Check out the event photo gallery