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Digital Health 2021

Why safety and equality are at the heart of AI in healthcare

Dr Indra Joshi

Director of AI, NHSX

It’s not enough to just develop solutions using AI-driven technology in health and care, we need to carefully assess the impact.


People working in healthcare are used to testing and adopting new ideas and there is huge enthusiasm about the challenge and opportunity of artificial intelligence. Now the challenge is in making sure we are confident that clinicians and patients in all communities will benefit equally.

At Milton Keynes University Hospital, the stroke team is using mobile app technology that has both increased the speed of reading the brain image and improved the treatment pathway for stroke patients.

Having scans on a mobile app has connected clinicians, accelerated decisions and facilitated working between hospital sites. When the need for expert diagnosis is recognised, that expert no longer needs to be on site to give feedback.

All these improvements to efficiency, rate of diagnosis and treatment has led to some re-thinking of the process for patients. Perhaps pinch points in the system could be reduced such as wait times. So now patients can feel the benefits too.

For AI to continue providing real change for public good, there is no point in technology for technology’s sake.

Asking the ethical questions

The NHS AI Award is funding technologies like this stroke example in order to boost AI deployment into hospitals and care settings.

Now the responsibility lies in ensuring that frontline services are equipped with both an understanding of how to adopt them, and the reassurance that they can be safely and ethically deployed.

The use of AI, and machine learning in particular, in safe and ethical ways is not without its challenges. The potential for inequalities exists in the unintentional preference of programmers, racial bias in data sets used during development and in funding disparities for some health issues over others.

As with all areas of the NHS, our mantra will continue to be: patients first.

Ensuring care equality

The COVID-19 pandemic has unfortunately highlighted some of the existing inequalities of care for minority communities. The NHS AI Lab is starting a much-needed national conversation to address AI’s potential impact on care inequality and the need for algorithmic impact assessments in AI developments.

New research plans, in collaboration with the Health Foundation, are launching soon, aimed at exploring how UK based AI-driven technologies can be used to improve inequalities in healthcare.

For AI to continue providing real change for public good, there is no point in technology for technology’s sake. We will keep working with health care professionals, innovators and commissioners to find and tackle the most impactful problems. As with all areas of the NHS, our mantra will continue to be: patients first.

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