Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare

Lee Rowley Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2019 Westminster Hall

[Lee Rowley (North East Derbyshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Crawley (Henry Smith) on securing the debate. He is a doughty champion and campaigner for this area of public health policy. It is great to have the opportunity to talk about it and the innovations and where it can go in the long term.

I congratulate the all-party parliamentary group on data analytics for its sterling work on this important report, which brings together a substantial amount of work and demonstrates the possibilities for the country and the sector to make progress in the coming years. I also welcome the Minister to her new role and I look forward to the work that she will be doing in this and many other areas—hopefully for longer than the coming days. I hope to see her in her place for many years to come.

I welcome the debate because it is a massively important subject for our country and the health of our citizens. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner), who highlighted some of the work that I have been involved in, in a tiny way, over the last few months. I thank the APPG for its kindness in allowing me and the hon. Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones) to do that. The commission that we co-chair, which looked into the importance of ethics in the aggregation of data and the use of technology, brought it home to me that we need to have more discussions such as this and that it is important for public policy to focus on these things.

I also welcome the debate because, for once, we are not talking about Brexit. It is a fantastic opportunity not to do that. I slightly regret bringing it up, but I will do it anyway. For me, this is the kind of debate that will be transformative for the people in our society and communities over the next 30 years. It will transform the royal hospital that serves my constituents in north-east Derbyshire and the hospitals in Sheffield, in the same way that automation, artificial intelligence, big data and machine learning will transform my local economy and the skills we need to teach in my local schools. If there had been more such debates, instead of the ones we have seen in the last few days, Parliament would have been in a healthier place in the last few months.

AI has the potential to be hugely transformative, as I saw as part of the commission. We need to look at it more, not just in healthcare but in education and elsewhere. Again, I congratulate the APPG on the report, which is a great start in the area of healthcare, but that is an area about which we have to be incredibly careful, as the hon. Member for Cambridge has eloquently outlined—much more eloquently that I can. Our population has trust in our healthcare systems and is willing, at the moment, to innovate in those areas, but those things are hard-won, are not particularly guaranteed and will be easily lost if we are not careful. The worst situation that we could end up with is one where there is huge potential in the area but we are unable to do anything because people do not wish it to be utilised or do not have confidence in it being utilised in the way they want.

I am pleased by some of the statistics in the report, particularly the level of confidence that is already there. Some 85% of people support in principle the use of artificial intelligence to move that area forward and 86% of people are willing to have their anonymised data shared. The hon. Member for Cambridge has already outlined, however, the challenge with that, because we may all like the idea of our data being shared as long as it is anonymous, but it is almost impossible to anonymise it. There are numerous reports that say that it takes only a few data attributes in the same area, even with a population dataset that is not particularly large, to retrofit them and work out where the data has come from and, ultimately, who the data points in it are. That is a challenge that we have to get over if we are to innovate, develop and utilise the technology.

Other aspects of AI’s use concern me greatly, such as security. We have to make sure that we consider security, whatever we are using AI technology for, whether in operations or additions to people. There is also a question about the development of the technology. We have a trade-off to make in which, as the hon. Member for Cambridge rightly said, the development will be judged and accelerated or decelerated by our appetite in this country for how we use data, what we do with it, what consent we have behind it and what the population are willing to do.

Countries elsewhere in the world do not have the same structures, rules, morals and ethics that we do in relation to the usage of data. We see that already in other areas. In China in particular the Government use personal data for the control of their citizens and people are incredibly uncomfortable with how that data is used. We have to create a framework around that. I am a small-state Conservative who believes in as little regulation as possible—not no regulation, as I believe in regulation where it is appropriate, but not in significant amounts. This is one area where, while I am not necessarily convinced that we need lots of regulation, we need to talk about what the regulation is and where we ultimately want to get to. The creation of the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation is positive. I know the Government, the Secretary of State and the Minister are working hard on this subject, but we need to have more conversations about it. This is a great start. I really welcome the debate and the report.

I have a personal interest, too. My father had a double heart bypass a number of years ago, after a heart attack. Luckily, he came through that. He is now busy doing whatever he is doing today—decorating or whatever. He would not be here today without the innovations of the last 40 or 50 years. I want to make sure that other people’s dads and mums are here in the next 50 years, because of this kind of technology, so long as it is used properly. The APPG is doing sterling work in ensuring that that is the case.

Finally—not to go back to Brexit!—my last point is that we need more of this sort of debate, please, and less of what we have had in the last few days in the other Chamber.