New Artificial Intelligence projects funded to tackle health inequalities

NHSX' NHS AI Lab and the Health Foundation have today awarded £1.4m to four projects to address racial and ethnic health inequalities using artificial intelligence (AI). The winning projects range from using AI to investigate disparities in maternal health outcomes to developing standards and guidance to ensure that datasets for training and testing AI systems are inclusive and generalisable. The NHS AI Lab introduced the AI Ethics Initiative to support research and practical interventions that complement existing efforts to validate, evaluate and regulate AI-driven technologies in health and care, with a focus on countering health inequalities. Today's announcement is the result of the Initiative's partnership with The Health Foundation on a research competition, enabled by NIHR, to understand and enable opportunities to use AI to address inequalities and to optimise datasets and improve AI development, testing and deployment. 'As we strive to ensure NHS patients are amongst the first in the world to benefit from leading AI, we also have a responsibility to ensure those technologies don't exacerbate existing health inequalities.