Implementing AI in the NHS: Why, What, How?
Ensuring AI implementation is technically feasible, socially acceptable, ethically justifiable, and legally compliant.
As we rapidly approach London data week and the national election, I have been asked several times a version of the question “what should the next government do to make AI work in the NHS?” Fortunately, (or unfortunately depending on your opinion of AI/me/academia), I spent three years attempting to answer that question. The very very very looooooooong answer I came up with is in my thesis “Designing an Algorithmically Enhanced NHS” which is available online here.
I am, however, aware that very few people have either the time or the desire to read c. 90,000 words about NHS information infrastructure. I did gave a fifteen minute overview of the findings and conclusions at the Nuffield Summit in March (which you can watch here) but that does lose (rather a lot) of the detail. SO in an attempt to find a balance between the too brief and the too long, I have recorded an 80 minute “lecture” version that answers the burning question “How can we enable the NHS to capitalise on the benefits of Algorithmic Clinical Decision Support Software (AI) while proactively mitigating the ethical risks of harm and the practical risks of failure?” You can watch it on descript, which provides the full transcript, or on YouTube below which still has captions if you prefer not to listen to my voice (can’t blame you).
A few more details before you go:
The slides from the above recording are here.
The completion of my thesis (and so its video version) would not have been possible without the support of a small army of people, all of whom are acknowledged here.
I also talk a lot about what ‘policy’ does and does not cover in the video. The full thesis goes into detail about exactly which policy documents I am describing. In the interest of not boring people to tears - the video does not. However, if you want the full list of the policy documents I base my analysis on then it is available here. (Separately, I’m working on updating the analysis to account for things that have happened in the last six months).
I am working on turning the thesis into individual publishable papers. So expect more soon.