HEE publishes roadmap on AI use in the NHS

Health Education England has published a roadmap into how artificial intelligence (AI) will be used in the NHS.

The roadmap sets out the current landscape of AI technologies that could be used in the NHS, including the clinical areas that could benefit and the workforce members most likely to be impacted. The roadmap’s authors also created an interactive dashboard to display the findings clearly in graphical form.

The roadmap was developed in cooperation with Unity Insights, with support from NICE, NHS AI Lab and the NHS Accelerated Access Collaborative (AAC).  The aim is to provide insights for NHS leaders into AI policy, education, regulation, innovation, digital transformation and workforce strategy. Part of the project involved creating a database of 240 AI technologies that could be used in the NHS.

AI most commonly used for diagnostic purposes

Among the report’s findings are:

• Of the 240 technologies, 56 (23%) were estimated to be ready for deployment within a year. Many of the technologies in this category were already in use within the NHS, with 77% of them being used in secondary care.
• 163 of the technologies have already been implemented in an NHS site.
• The most common type of AI technology in the database was “diagnostic” at 34%, followed by automation/service efficiency’ at 29%, with P4 Medicine (an approach to make medicine more predictive, preventive, personalised and participatory) accounting for 17% and remote monitoring at 14%.
• The database included 67 clinical areas. Nearly a quarter of the technologies were for “multiple clinical areas”, with clinical radiology coming next at 11%, followed by cardiology at 9% and general practice at 8%.

Dr Hatim Abdulhussein, clinical lead for the digital, artificial intelligence and robotics technologies in education (DART-Ed) programme at Health Education England, described the roadmap as an “invaluable asset in helping to understand the AI and data driven landscape in healthcare, and the implications this will have.” He added: “It is important we achieve transformation through emerging technology, helping scalability to improve patient care throughout the country, and can understand impact on the system, pathways, and users. We need to ensure the workforce is ready to support this aim and the insights from this roadmap will focus our efforts on education and training to achieve this.”

The authors of the roadmap note certain limitations to the exercise. The data collection, for example, “relied on publicly available data and did not seek to validate the claims and evidence publicised by the companies; therefore some benefits may be overstated, especially for technologies at an early stage of development.” They note that keeping the roadmap up to date is “critical to keeping the dashboard relevant and insightful.”