Artificial intelligence (AI) could soon improve care for patients and working conditions for clinicians, with one company focused on usability now supporting NHS Scotland across primary, secondary and out-of-hours services.

In the second of two articles on the opportunities for NHS Scotland from joining up its digital systems, the Senior Vice President of service provider OneAdvanced, Ric Thompson, has been telling healthandcare.scot how AI can unlock productivity across NHS Scotland in ways that remain safe and secure for patients.

The Scottish government is committed to trying to end the 8am rush to book GP appointments as it invests in expanding services, improving access and providing alternatives to face to face appointments with a doctor.

Ric Thompson foresees online and webchat consultations with Scottish GPs becoming much more common – with the added safeguard of AI:

“When a patient sends an online consultation form into a GP practice using our platform, that query is analysed using our AI ‘urgency agent’ to determine if it's urgent and, if it is, it can stop the patient in their tracks and route them through to a more appropriate setting, be that A&E, the 111 service or 999.”

When OneAdvanced purchased the Vision electronic patient record system used by GP practices across Scotland, they completed an NHS IT jigsaw.

Vision complemented OneAdvanced’s existing stable: GP Document Workflow platform Docman and urgent and secondary care systems Clinical Decision Support (Odyssey) and Clinical Patient Management (Adastra).

“I think Scotland is now at the cusp of adopting some of the AI technologies that we've built to work on these platforms,” says Mr Thompson.

“So, while our key focus is to continue our partnership with NHS Scotland to roll out the Vision electronic patient record system, we’re also asking where can we start to introduce some of our AI technology?

“For instance, we've got AI urgency tools and AI signposting that we would now like to start to introduce alongside Vision in GP practices.”

Help for clinicians

Ric Thompson says increasing NHS productivity should be about delivering more high quality care from the same workforce not asking people to work harder. For instance, a report published last year showed that the NHS across the UK could save £75m a year with just one AI tool in one GP workflow.

“I am convinced that the right tools can remove the friction between tasks for clinicians and cut the time spent on the things that happen around each consultation.

“An example of an AI tool we’ve just brought to market is an ‘ambient scribe’ technology. This allows allow clinicians to automatically transcribe and summarise the clinician patient consultation, which could be massively time saving for them. This is now available to our Clinical Patient Management (Adastra) customers – and is the only Scribe technology that will be embedded into the clinician’s workflow within the platform – unlike many tools which do not integrate. This is a fundamental part of our roadmap, seamless workflows.

“We are also using AI to summarise long clinical letters and to do some of the important clinical coding for each patient within the GP care setting.”

Keeping it human – and safe

The challenge,” says Ric Thompson, “is to reduce the administrative burden on clinicians whilst keeping everything super safe.

“One problem for our clinicians that we want to avoid is them having to log in to a new, separate system every time they want to do something because different tools are not interoperable. We want things to be seamless for them.

“Our philosophy around AI is, firstly, to keep the human in the loop. So, while we seek to improve efficiency and productivity, we are not trying to automate the process of clinicians engaging with their patients. And the place for AI to be of most value is to use it in the clinician’s existing ‘flow of work’.

“A second thing that's super important with AI is transparency: showing how AI has derived its outcome. There has to be an audit trail that’s visible so that, if the AI makes a suggestion, a clinician can work right back and understand everything that has been considered. And a third principle and safeguard is ensuring that we've got the right governance, testing and validation process for every AI tool that we develop.”

Central to maintaining safety and security of its AI systems has been OneAdvanced’s decision to build its own sovereign large language model hosted in the same UK data centres where its clinical applications and patient data sets are secured.

Early insights

Ric Thompson says joining together NHS Scotland’s rich datasets, and then using AI to analyse them, could be game-changing:

“If you think about the data that the NHS has right now, we've got a whole stack of unstructured data – in clinical letters for instance – and also structured data clinically coded in the electronic patient record system.

“When you bring datasets together with the power of AI, you can look for rare signals that allow you to do early disease detection on a far wider scale than at present.

“We are at an earlier stage here, but we are looking to create early detection agents that we can use within a patient cohort that will identify effectively certain patients far sooner.

“For instance, identifying people at heightened risk of lung cancer. We know that if you can detect lung cancer six months before a patient presents, then the outcome for them is very different and the costs to treat are very different.

“AI used to examine patient data can also identify people eligible for new clinical trials, meaning that trials can recruit faster and patients can be identified who have the best chance of benefiting.”

 

Ric Thompson is an opening keynote speaker at the forthcoming Digital Health and Care Scotland two day event on 10 and 11 February at Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh.

You can read the first of two articles by Ric Thompson on the ‘transformative step’ that the NHS in Scotland can now take to join up its IT systems.

This article is written as part of a promotional agreement between OneAdvanced and Healthcare News Scotland.

 

Read more: NHS IT ready to take ’transformative’ step; NHS boards told to collaborate as two regions; Research enabled innovation spotlighted; Half billion pound GP investment ‘largest ever’

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