DonateLife Victoria is rolling out an AI assistant across its clinical team to give staff faster access to information contained in its clinical and operational documents.
The assistant, called Sal, was developed by Australia and New Zealand consultancy GravityLab using Salesforce Agentforce and went live in production in September.
It searches 26 DonateLife Victoria clinical and operational documents and provides answers with citations to the source material, allowing clinicians to check the information against the original document.
DonateLife Victoria coordinates organ and tissue donation across Victoria, where staff can need to locate specific information such as hospital details, addresses and contacts during time-critical cases.
General manager Tony Holland said staff had previously needed to manually search documents for the information.
“That’s the kind of question our staff deal with constantly, and it used to mean stopping everything to search,” Mr Holland said.
“Now it’s instant. That difference matters when someone’s in the middle of a case and every minute counts.”
Sal is restricted to information contained in DonateLife Victoria’s approved documents rather than drawing on general knowledge.
The system retrieves relevant documents, checks whether they contain information addressing the question and provides a citation with its response. It is also designed to return an “I don’t know” response when it cannot find sufficient information.
DonateLife Victoria’s source documents are held in Microsoft SharePoint, with staff continuing to maintain them through their existing processes.
GravityLab developed a process to convert information held in tables within key documents into a format that could be retrieved by the assistant, without moving the underlying source material.
“We needed the nurses to know with a high level of confidence that the answer that’s been given is accurate, and where it’s come from. That’s where the guardrails are being built,” Mr Holland said.
He said individual searches could save around 15 minutes, with multiple searches during a case potentially saving one or two hours.
GravityLab tested the assistant using real questions with verified answers before it was put into production.
GravityLab founder Daniel Howell said the focus was on ensuring the system did not provide an answer when it could not find sufficient supporting information.
“The easy part of AI is making something sound confident. The hard part is making it honest, willing to say ‘I don’t know’ instead of guessing,” Mr Howell said.
DonateLife Victoria is now expanding Sal across its wider clinical team.
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