The UK government is investing £21 million in extending AI usage in the National Health Service (NHS) to improve healthcare diagnosis and treatment. NHS trusts are eligible to apply for funding to hasten the deployment of AI tools across the country. The new AI Diagnostic Fund will bring the most promising AI imaging and decision-support tools to diagnose and treat patients with heart conditions, cancer, and strokes. The government plans to utilize AI tools to examine chest x-rays to aid physicians in detecting early signs of lung cancer, which has a mortality rate of over 35,000 people in the UK annually. NHS Trusts will be able to apply for funds for any AI diagnostic tool that they consider appropriate, as long as they can justify their request in terms of value-for-money. With recent advancements in AI and powerful language models, the government is placing the UK at the forefront of the AI revolution.
In the past, the NHS’s AI experiments have raised concerns, with a data regulator ruling that a data-sharing partnership with Google’s DeepMind broke privacy laws. The UK government has launched tech company-friendly guidelines instead of legislation around AI development and is also providing £100 million to develop AI models for use in sectors such as healthcare and education. Earlier this month, Prime minister Rishi Sunak said that AI giants such as Google’s DeepMind and Anthropic would provide early or priority access to their AI models to help research the safety and assessment of AI. The government believes that AI usage in hospitals across the country will improve healthcare and is looking to deploy AI tools across all NHS stroke networks by the end of the year.
