Artificial intelligence #01: what's it all about? Practice Business

The Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) adopts the AI definition found in the government's industrial strategy white paper – Industrial Strategy: building a Britain fit for the future, Department for Business, Energy and Industry Strategy, November 2017 "Technologies with the ability to perform tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence" This definition includes everything from the simplest application of AI, which relies on making decisions based on static, predefined rules and parameter checking – e.g. if x, then do y – as well as simple'yes' or'no' decision trees, right through to the dynamic complex'learning (or evolving)' algorithms which continuously review incoming data, find patterns and adapt existing algorithms (and so, 'learn'). The rise of AI is sometimes represented as a threatening new development – but many, now mundane, functions were once seen as awe-inspiring new AI developments! Everyday examples of functionality previously, but no longer, considered as AI include voice-to-text transcription – now available on any smartphone, the digitising of scanned documents through handwriting recognition or optical character recognition and spam filtering. Like it or not, health tech is being embraced at the highest NHS and government levels. Speaking at a digital health conference this summer – Unlocking the promise of digital health – Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, pledged to consider reimbursement reforms to the NHS tariff and other payment systems to incentivise the uptake of AI technologies across the health system.