A new National Artificial Intelligence Lab will use the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the health and lives of patients
The AI Lab will bring together the industry’s best academics, specialists and technology companies to work on some of the biggest challenges in health and care, including earlier cancer detection, new dementia treatments and more personalised care.
AI is already being developed in some hospitals, successfully predicting cancer survival rates and cutting the number of missed appointments.
The AI Lab’s work could:
improve cancer screening by speeding up the results of tests, including mammograms, brain scans, eye scans and heart monitoringuse predictive models to better estimate future needs of beds, drugs, devices or surgeriesidentify which patients could be more easily treated in the community, reducing the pressure on the NHS and helping patients receive treatment closer to homeidentify patients most at risk of diseases such as heart disease or dementia, allowing for earlier diagnosis and cheaper, more focused, personalised preventionbuild systems to detect people at risk of post-operative complications, infections or requiring follow-up from clinicians, improving patient safety and reducing readmission ratesupskill the NHS workforce so they can use AI systems for day-to-day tasksinspect algorithms already used by the NHS to increase the standards of AIsafety, making systems fairer, more robust and ensuring patient confidentiality is protectedautomate routine admin tasks to free up clinicians so more time can be spent with patients
The lab will sit within NHSX, the new organisation that will oversee the digitisation of the health and care system, in partnership with the Accelerated Access Collaborative.
The investment will support the ambitions in the NHS Long Term Plan, which includes pledges to use AI to help clinicians eliminate variations in care.
The Prime Minister said:
Health Secretary Matt Hancock said:
Simon Stevens, NHS England Chief Executive, said: