Combatting UK health inequalities with Artificial Intelligence

The £1.4m funding is financed by the NHS' AI Lab – called NHSX – and The Health Foundation, with the projects aiming to utilise AI to address racial and ethnic health inequalities in the UK. The selected initiatives will implement the technology in a broad range of investigations, from assessing disparities in maternal health outcomes to designing standards and guidance to ensure AI systems are inclusive and generalisable. The NHS AI lab introduced the AI Ethics Initiative in March 2021 to assist research and practical interventions that enhance existing efforts to validate, evaluate, and regulate AI-based technologies in the healthcare sector to mitigate health inequalities. This considerable funding results from their partnership with The Health Foundation on a research competition, which the NIHR enabled. The endeavour saw the organisations collaborate to explore and create opportunities to employ AI to address health inequalities and optimise datasets to improve AI's development, testing, and deployment.