AI in the NHS: Navigating Challenges and Opportunities
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Hanish Abdulla explores the imminent use of AI in healthcare systems.
The National Health Service (NHS) has been undergoing something along the lines of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution, which underpins huge promises to transform health in the UK from cancer diagnosis to better patient waiting times. The first major investment came under Rishi Sunak’s premiership with a £21 million AI Diagnostic Fund which was first introduced in 2023 and is already helping 50% of the hospital trusts to deploy AI. The fruits of this investment was seen in Leeds, in which a pilot project as part of the Yorkshire Imaging Collaborative is using AI to help doctors interpret chest X-rays more quickly and accurately which is a huge boon to the trust which performs over 135,000 such scans annually.
A new “ambient voice” technology that listens to consultations and automatically writes clinical notes is currently being trialled to reduce the immense administrative burden on doctors, giving them more time to focus on patients. The goal is to free up clinicians from time consuming administrative tasks. Despite the myriad of pilots going on, a recent study found that 90% of AI tools remain stuck in pilot phases due to over reliance on temporary IT setups in each NHS trust. To alleviate this problem a new AI research screening platform dubbed AIR-SP is being built by NHS England to enable trusts across the country to join trials of AI in screening to help speed up diagnosis. The new NHS cloud will hold multiple AI tools in a single environment and offer secure access to all NHS trusts.
Wes Streeting, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, said:
“As our world-leading scientists develop new lifesaving AI tools, this new cloud platform will see them rolled out to patients in research trials right across the country – so staff can treat patients quicker with cutting-edge tech.”
Experts have also cautioned about the risks of algorithmic bias where AI trained on non-diverse data could worsen health inequalities. To ensure that AI is used safely and ethically a new National Commission composed of experts from Google, Microsoft as well leading clinicians, researchers and patient advocates has been formed to rewrite the regulatory rule book which is set to be published next year.
The push for AI within the NHS is more than a technological upgrade, it’s a test of its founding principles. The ideal future is one where the technology empowers clinicians and delivers faster and more precise care to patients. However, this future is not guaranteed and it is being actively threatened by practical failures and more critically the moral failure of deploying biased algorithms that could corrupt the NHS’s commitment to universal, equitable care.
Words by Hanish Abdulla