NHS will roll out radiology AI in ten healthcare institutions
A collaboration between the Artificial Intelligence Center for Value-Based Healthcare, King’s College London and Guy’s and St Thomas’ National Health Service Foundation Trusts, aimed at accelerating the adoption and deployment of radiological AI, is working with Deepc to provide access to six NHS trusts.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
Around 133,000 scans are made every day in Britain, but the NHS is facing a 29% shortage of clinical radiologists to analyze those images, according to an announcement from AI operating systems provider Deepc.
Delays directly impact patient outcomes, including longer hospital stays and increased risk of serious complications.
Although radiological AI has long been used to increase the number of scans that healthcare systems can analyze and also help improve the accuracy of diagnosis, few NHS patients have benefited as deploying radiological AI in clinical settings is too has been expensive and technically complex – especially with older IT systems, the company said.
Deepc said in an announcement on Thursday that it will provide immediate access to six initial NHS sites and backlogged radiology departments access to more than 75 regulatory-approved AI tools.
The first NHS trusts to deploy DeepcOS are Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust and East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation To trust.
The AI4VBH aims to incubate the development of AI technology within the national healthcare system in order to implement it safely, said Sebastien Ourselin, director of the center.
“Our partnership with Deepc will start by helping six NHS Trusts access more than 75 clinically proven AI tools – but that’s just the start,” he said.
The company said that through a single integration that spans data privacy, security, regulatory, purchasing, integration, deployment and operations, healthcare systems can quickly deploy radiology AI and help reduce patient wait times, help physicians make faster diagnoses and improve the can relieve pressure. in NHS radiology departments.
The current partnership will expand to ten trusts, Deepc said.
Last month AI4VBH was has awarded £1.8 million in NHS England funding to partner with the London Secure Data Environment, a citywide network, for a two-year AI collaboration.
THE BIG TREND
In 2021, the British government will invested £36 million to boost AI research for NHS projects to improve the quality of care and increase the speed of diagnoses for conditions such as lung cancer. Two years ago, NHS researchers announced they were using COVID-19 breast imaging data to assess the accuracy of health and care algorithms.
They created a blueprint for testing AI models to pave the way for safer adoption of AI in UK healthcare. Using the model, NHS has also rolled out an AI tool that they said could detect heart disease within 20 seconds.
Dr. British Heart Foundation Associate Professor Sonya Babu-Narayan called it a “huge advance for doctors and patients” and said it revolutionized MRI image analysis of the heart.
She was deputy medical director of the Barts Heart Center at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, one of three hospitals where the technology was pilot tested before it was made available across the NHS.
“The pandemic has resulted in a backlog of hundreds of thousands of people waiting for vital heart scans, treatment and care,” she said. Healthcare IT news.
“Despite the delay in cardiac care, as people remain on waiting lists, they risk avoidable disability and death. That’s why it’s encouraging to see innovations like this, which together could help speed up heart diagnoses and ease workloads so that in the future we can give more NHS heart patients the best possible care much sooner.”
ON THE RECORD
“Working together we can make the NHS a true leader in the safe and effective use of AI, ultimately benefiting our patients,” said Ourselin.
Andrea Fox is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.