One year on: How AI can supercharge the healthcare of the future

As we approach one year since the first national lockdown in the UK, it is clear that Covid-19 is still putting enormous pressures on our healthcare system. Indeed, the NHS reported in January that a record 4.46 million people were on the waiting list for routine treatments and operations, and a recent study by the British Medical Association found that almost 60% of doctors are suffering from some form of anxiety or depression. The path to recovering from this healthcare fallout will not be easy, however, when thinking about how we could alleviate this pressure in the future, emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technologies may be the answer. The World Health Organisation (WHO) predicts that there will be a shortfall of around 9.9 million healthcare professionals worldwide by 2030, despite the economy being able to create 40 million new health sector jobs by the same year. With larger, aging populations and increasingly complex healthcare demands, there will continue to be strain on health workers for the foreseeable future – so how can AI alleviate this?