Microsoft's global outage has hit vital NHS services, with the medical computer system EMIS not working. The EMIS system is used by GPs to book appointments, view patient notes, order prescriptions and make referrals. However doctors in parts of the UK are currently reporting having a '100 per cent outage' with patients also telling MailOnline they can't get life-saving drugs. Speaking to this website a GP practice manager in Berkshire said: 'We are completely dead in the water. 'We can't see any patients our systems are down.

Indra: AI is successful when answering a problem, rather than just doing something fun with a pile of data. For example, we've seen it working well in triage where we have a huge number of images that need reporting on and, if you're helping people know that something is normal and fine, versus quite urgently not normal, then you're solving a real problem and people are more likely to adopt it. Afzal: There's a great deal of opportunity from basic decision support tools directing people to order sets of investigations based upon the patient's chart, to patient care examples such as AI predicting patient readiness for discharge or likelihood of readmission, to higher level uses around planning a service for coming months and years (though these predictions have been disrupted by COVID-19). Two big challenges are the quality of data that feeds these tools in the first place, but also the required level of confidence in the nature of the algorithms among professionals, patients and society as a whole. Arvind: In primary care there are lots of opportunities for AI to assist.

The Government has said that artificial intelligence (AI) in GP practices will help manage patients in the elective care backlog. It today announced that new technology and innovation will allow the NHS to treat 30% more elective care patients by 2023/24. It added that NHS'come forward with a delivery plan for tackling the backlog'. In March, NHS England suggested that GPs could be asked to review hospital waiting lists for elective care to help prioritise and manage patients from the following month. Details were limited, but NHS England later told GPs that they must'jointly manage' patients stuck in the backlog of care caused by the Covid pandemic with hospitals. Meanwhile, Pulse revealed in June that NHSX and NHS England were considering the viability of a wider roll out of an artificial intelligence triage model based on that used by Babylon.