Building health AIs should be UK ambition, says strategy review

A wide-ranging, UK government-commissioned industrial strategy review of the life sciences sector, conducted by Oxford University's Sir John Bell, has underlined the value locked up in publicly funded data held by the country's National Health Service -- and called for a new regulatory framework to be established in order to "capture for the UK the value in algorithms generated using NHS data". The NHS is a free-at-the-point of use national health service covering some 65 million users -- which gives you an idea of the unique depth and granularity of the patient data it holds. And how much potential value could therefore be created for the nation by utilizing patient data-sets to develop machine learning algorithms for medical diagnosis and tracking. "AI is likely to be used widely in healthcare and it should be the ambition for the UK to develop and test integrated AI systems that provide real-time data better than human monitoring and prediction of a wide range of patient outcomes in conditions such as mental health, cancer and inflammatory disease," writes Bell in the report. His recommendation for the government and the NHS to be pro-active about creating and capturing AI-enabled value off of valuable, taxpayer-funded health data-sets comes hard on the heels of the conclusion of a lengthy investigation by the UK's data protection watchdog, the ICO, into a controversial 2015 data-sharing arrangement between Google-DeepMind and a London-based NHS Trust, the Royal Free Hospitals Trust, to co-develop a clinical task management app.