We are running a series of webinars looking at recent exciting developments in AI, robotics and digital technologies including the work the DART-Ed programme are undertaking around education, and preparing the workforce with the knowledge and skills they will need, now and for the future. Digital technology is transforming how dentistry will be delivered in the future. Adopting digital opportunities will enable staff and patients to confidently navigate this new digital environment. This webinar will provide a scene setting to digital readiness in dentistry, as well as demonstrate the potential role of AI in dentistry and the interoperability challenge in the context of the profession. The third installment of the DART-Ed webinar series took place on 11 August 2022 and looked at how artificial intelligence has the potential to transform healthcare, and in many cases is starting to do so.

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.

Four projects have received a share of £1.4million to use artificial intelligence to address racial and ethical health inequalities. The funding, a joint programme with the NHSX AI Lab and the Health Foundation, aims to ensure healthcare solutions don't "exacerbate existing health inequalities". The four projects range from using artificial intelligence (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. Dr Indra Joshi, director of the AI Lab at NHSX, said: "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. "These projects will ensure the NHS can deploy safe and ethical artificial intelligence tools that meet the needs of minority communities and help our workforce deliver patient-centred and inclusive care to all." Speaking exclusively to The Guardian today (October 20) health secretary Sajid Javid said he was committed to "removing barriers" in the NHS. "As the first health and social care secretary from an ethnic minority background, I care deeply about tackling the disparities which exist within the healthcare system.

NHSX has laid out its vision, approach and areas of focus for developing a new National Strategy for AI in Health and Social Care. The NHS AI Lab is currently working on a plan that will outline its ambitions for the'development, implementation, scaling and monitoring of AI-driven technologies' in the UK. The organisation has created a draft strategy to support the ultimate goal of deploying AI at scale, in an'effective' and'ethical' way. According to NHSX, its research will consist of three phases: research to understand the current digital health landscape; discussions with those who will use or feel the impact of the new technologies; and looking into possible'futures' for AI. A team of stakeholders, a selection of people involved in the development and deployment of AI in health, as well as potential users of the technologies, have formed a working group to help guide the development of the strategy.

Faculty, a VC-backed artificial intelligence startup, has won a tender to work with the NHS to make better predictions about its future requirements for patients, based on data drawn from how it handled the COVID-19 pandemic. In December 2019, Faculty raised a $10.5 million Series A funding round from U.K.-based VCs Local Globe, GMG Ventures, and Jaan Tallinn, one of Skype's founding engineers, giving it a valuation of around $100 million. Faculty will work with NHS England and NHS Improvement to build upon the Early Warning System (EWS) it developed for the service during the pandemic. Based on Bayesian hierarchical modeling, Faculty says the EWS uses aggregate data (for example, COVID-19 positive case numbers, 111 calls and mobility data) to warn hospitals about potential spikes in cases so they can divert staff, beds and equipment needed. This learning will now be applied across the whole of the service, for issues other than the pure pandemic response, such as improving service delivery and patient care and predicting A&E demand and winter pressures.

Cheshire and Merseyside has become the first regional data hub for the newly launched national Covid-19 chest imaging database. The consortium has integrated data across 13 trusts, providing researchers with access to 15 years of imaging data across 2.5 million people in the region. Working with tech supplier Philips to deploy its SMART box solution, the region was able to consolidate the data into one hub. The interface was commissioned in January 2021 and has since been used for cross-site image retrieval for the National Covid-19 chest imaging database (NCCID). Introducing this solution makes Cheshire and Merseyside better placed to lead the way in setting standards in multi-trust collaboration with regional partners. It is the only regional hub connected to NCCID.

Health Minister Matt Hancock has announced the provision of £140 million to support the development of artificial intelligence services for healthcare. He said the money will be made available over the next three years through the National AI Lab – created last August within NHSX – through competitions run twice a year through the NHS Accelerated Access Collaborative. Announcing the plan in a speech to the Healthtech Alliance, Hancock said the focus will be on "finding and boosting existing technologies with serious scale-up potential", and that the awards will cover all stages of the product cyber, from proof of concept to initial adoption in the NHS. The first call for proposals will focus on screening, diagnosis, clinical decision support and system efficiency. He added that the AI Lab, which provides a forum for academics, specialists and technology companies to harness the technology for healthcare, will also have a skunkworks unit to build and rapidly test prototypes.

The adoption of technology in the NHS is more closely tied to meeting a "political or commercial imperative" rather than improving care, according to about a dozen stakeholders from across the health system who were interviewed for a new report. Published by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, or RSA, the "Patient AI" paper - first covered by the Health Service Journal - sought to identify how the introduction of emerging technologies was "influencing commissioning and clinical practice" across the NHS. The RSA said understanding and agreeing on the purposes for the deployment of new tools and systems needed to be the "starting point for a more constructive conversation" in order to tackle the "embedded scepticism" that it was not being done for the right reasons. The organisation carried out interviews under the Chatham House Rule with professionals involved in the development, procurement and use of data-driven technologies for the health service in England earlier this year. It outlined the work done in partnership with NHSX, the unit for digital, data and technology, and found interviewees believed that a lot of the challenges in embedding new tools stemmed from the fact that the NHS did not see itself as a "digital organisation".

Read our new report into the state of #AI in healthcare, where we see practical applications for this tech, and what we're doing to build ethics, transparency and #NHS values into the way we use this tech.

Simon Eccles is on a mission to streamline the NHS with technology. His goal is for people's health information and their pathway through care to be seamless. But he isn't pretending this is going to be easy. The chief clinical information officer for the NHS, and deputy chief executive of NHSX, says: "The more work I do internationally, the more I am aware that everybody is finding this a challenge." Five years from now, Eccles thinks NHS tech may not have changed radically.