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FT editor Roula Khalaf selects her favourite stories on this weekly newsletter.
From 2023 lower than 1 in 4 people were satisfied with the NHS – the bottom number ever recorded. The UK's latest Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is set to repair the shortcomings and link the health of the nation to the health of the economy.
Data and technology have the potential to tackle most of the NHS’s challenges and revolutionise care and research. As early as 2012, a knowledge evaluation by the Open Data Institute (ODI) showed that The NHS could save £200 million annually by changing the prescription of statins. But the opportunities remain largely untapped.
In the race to introduce artificial intelligence, the federal government has neglected data management, as our recent Paper Highlights. However, for the NHS to reap the advantages of AI, a robust data infrastructure is crucial.
Good data management could improve the standard, safety and cost-effectiveness of care within the NHS. AI technologies, in response to IBMcould reduce treatment costs by 50 percent and improve outcomes by 40 percent.
The NHS stores huge amounts of knowledge, often in isolated IT systems, making it difficult to make use of across the healthcare system.
Even before the AI ​​boom, data played an important role in research and NHS healthcare. Initiatives resembling Open safely And Health Data Research UK improve our understanding of diseases, enable personalized treatments and increase efficiency.
The UK is a world leader within the reuse of health data. NHS AI Lab uses machine learning to predict diseases, discover high-risk patients and recommend treatments, and AI tools resembling “C the characters“ have significantly increased cancer detection rates.
Of course, the usage of sensitive health data raises questions on data protection and security. The involvement of the US data evaluation company Palantir within the NHS Federated Data Platform has raised concerns amongst people about whether the advantages of knowledge sharing outweigh the danger of misuse of their information.
It is due to this fact crucial to achieve and maintain public trust. the GDPR campaign 2021Patients resolve against sharing health data almost doubleddue to this fact, organisations have to reassure the general public of their trustworthiness. UK data protection laws predate AI and large-scale data sharing and should be updated.
Data sharing is complicated because 189 NHS trusts collect patient data through various electronic systems. AI models also use data from medical imaging, genomics and wearable devices. The ODI recommends that the NHS and the brand new government Fair principles for the administration and sharing of this data.
To harness the advantages of AI effectively and responsibly, a well-maintained data infrastructure is crucial. This includes interoperable open standards, secure data storage, efficient data processing and strict data protection regulations.
While we wait for a national data infrastructure, developments in machine learning are allowing researchers to access and analyze sensitive data without compromising privacy or security. In addition, technologies have emerged that improve data protection and provides people direct access and control over their very own health data.
Federated Learning (FL) allows algorithms to access data from multiple local datasets without exchanging the underlying data. This has shown promising results, resembling Curial Federated Platformwhich developed a Covid-19 screening test using training data from 4 NHS trusts, with the hospitals retaining data custody.
Secure data platforms resembling Secure Data Environment (SDE) And Open safely Give researchers access to anonymised NHS data.
To improve the NHS, we want a collective commitment to moral, transparent and revolutionary data practices, from ensuring access to high-quality, well-managed data to enforcing data protection and mental property rights.
Without these measures, it’ll be difficult to attain Streeting’s vision of the UK as a MedTech “powerhouse” and an NHS that unlocks the potential of artificial intelligence.
