NHS: Artificial Intelligence

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Tuesday 24th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for his question and congratulate him and the rest of the committee on the excellent report, AI in the UK: Ready, Willing and Able?, which has a substantial chapter on AI’s application in healthcare. The potential to transform every element of health and care is susceptible to artificial intelligence. A couple of areas outside the clinical setting that I would highlight are workforce planning and triaging patients between different forms of care. As for support, in addition to the items in my first Answer, I highlight the work of the Topol review, which is designed to make sure that staff are fully equipped and trained to take advantage of these technologies as they come through the system, rather than letting them sit with a few early adopters and not becoming more widespread in the NHS.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, it is quite clear that the use of big data and AI will have transformative outcomes for patients. There are at least two challenges. The first is investment, which the Minister has already mentioned. What framework of accountability and transparency is in place to deal with that level of investment? How will we know whether it is being sensibly invested? The second is safeguarding and protecting data, and I use my local hospital as an example. A partnership between Google DeepMind and the Royal Free Hospital trust resulted in a breach of the Data Protection Act and the personal data of more than 1.6 million patients was transferred to the Google subsidiary as part of the creation of Streams, an app to diagnose and detect acute kidney injury—which we would, of course, all support. This suggests inexperienced procurement and negotiation skills in the NHS and the potential for the Googles of this world to run rings round them, to all our detriment. What are the Government doing to safeguard patients and their data?

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

The case the noble Baroness highlighted brings to the fore both the potential benefits and risks. There are tremendous benefits in having personalised healthcare, and we all want to see that delivered. At the same time, if data is not used safely and securely we lose the public’s trust. If we do not have that trust, we will not be able to get the changes that we want. The Government respect the decisions made by the Information Commissioner and National Data Guardian in their judgments about poor practice at the Royal Free. I am pleased to say that the hospital has responded well to these. We are doing a couple of things to make more systematic changes. First is implementing the proper data standards of the GDPR in one month’s time. We will also make sure that National Data Guardian’s 10 data standards are written into every NHS contract so that, when it comes to procurement, there is understanding about the kind of things they should and should not be doing to safeguard data.