It’s no news that Artificial Intelligence is changing the way we work. Although it has huge potential in making tasks easier, if used incorrectly AI can waste more time than it saves. That’s why the Health Service Journal called in the Health Economics Unit (HEU) to share their knowledge and insights on the best way to employ this new technology.

The one-day hackathon focused on the fact that AI is already part of everyday work, and how it can be used to enhance roles and make tasks easier rather than replace people.

A team from the HEU joined staff from across the HSJ discussing both the opportunities and the limitations of AI, helping participants understand what these tools are good at and where critical judgement is still needed.

A key theme was learning how to build effective prompts and inputs to get better results. Through hands-on experimentation, participants, including those with no coding experience, used AI to prototype simple tools and workflows that could help automate tasks and make their day-to-day work faster and more efficient.

HSJ Correspondent Ella Devereux said: “The session showed me how tools like Chat GPT and Colab can be used to automate otherwise time-consuming work.

“Being able to pull trust board papers from multiple webpages, sift them for keywords and look for patterns over several years is something that would normally take days to do manually.

“Learning how to create code in Colab to do this has opened up a new way of spotting trends across my regional patch that just wouldn’t be feasible otherwise.”

The session included lively discussion about which tools were best suited for more, versus less, structured tasks, ongoing, versus one-off, tasks, and tasks where AI could be more autonomous, versus ones where it required human supervision, in particular thinking about the set of tools available to HSJ currently and what best suits their needs in an efficient and cost-effective way.

Want to learn more about how you can better use AI to help with your work? Contact the HEU.