New AI funding to reduce racial inequality in health

Four artificial intelligence (AI) projects have been awarded funding from the NHSX AI Lab and the Health Foundation to address racial and ethnic inequality in health.

The four projects are:

• A University of Westminster project to raise the uptake of screening for STIs/HIV among minority ethnic communities through an automated AI-driven chatbot providing advice about sexually transmitted infections.
• A Loughborough University project that will use AI to investigate disparities in maternal health outcomes in different ethnic groups. The research will help understand how causal factors combine to lead to maternal harm, and make it easier to design targeted interventions that are more effective for these groups.
• A joint project from St George’s, University of London and Moorfields Eye Hospital to ensure that AI technologies to detect diabetic retinopathy work for all. The study will provide evidence of the effectiveness and safety of the AI retinal image analysis systems to be used in the NHS Diabetic Eye Screening Programme (DESP).
• A University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust project to develop standards and guidance to ensure that datasets for training and testing AI systems are inclusive and generalisable.

Making sure AI doesn’t exacerbate health inequalities

NHSX’s AI Lab introduced the AI Ethics Initiative to promote the safe, ethical and effective adoption of AI in health care. It has a particular emphasis on making sure that AI products used in the NHS and social care do not exacerbate health inequalities.

The four projects awarded funding are all winners of a research competition run by the AI Ethics Initiative in partnership with The Health Foundation. They are being funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).

Dr Indra Joshi, director of the AI Lab, said: “As we strive to ensure NHS patients are amongst the first in the world to benefit from leading AI, we also have a responsibility to ensure those technologies don’t exacerbate existing health inequalities.

“These projects will ensure the NHS can deploy safe and ethical artificial intelligence tools that meet the needs of minority communities and help our workforce deliver patient-centred and inclusive care to all.”

Josh Keith, a senior fellow at the Health Foundation, said that data-driven technology was having a profound impact on the health care system, but that “we need to focus on making sure the impacts are positive, so that everyone’s health and care benefits.” He said he hoped the four projects would make an important contribution to “helping ensure the advancement of AI-driven technologies improves health outcomes for minority ethnic populations in the UK.”