Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to enhance (a) early disease detection and (b) diagnosis through AI adoption.

The Department has provided £113 million, through the NHS AI Health and Care Awards, to 86 artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, which have been live in 40% of National Health Service acute trusts in England and hundreds of primary care networks across the United Kingdom. This funding is helping us to generate the evidence needed to deploy effective AI tools across the NHS and improve the lives and health outcomes of our population.

Many of these AI technologies are being tested and evaluated to aid healthcare diagnostics. For example, AI is being used to analyse and interpret acute stroke brain scans, to support doctors making treatment decisions in 100% of stroke units in England. In addition, the Department is focusing the £21 million AI Diagnostic Fund on the deployment of technologies in key, high-demand areas such as chest X-ray and chest computed tomography scans, to enable faster diagnosis of lung cancer in over half of acute trusts in England.

Despite these exciting examples of AI use, deployment of AI in the NHS is still at a relatively early stage. To address this, the Department is carrying out work to assess the barriers of effective adoption and improve the way AI tools are deployed across the NHS.