Gary Dannatt, chief operating officer at Pharmacy2U, examines the role of Artificial Intelligence in the pharma industry
Artificial Intelligence has the potential to transform healthcare and the pharma industry; making health services more predictive, more effective and more equitable.
But can AI’s potential be realised, and what can chief information officers and clinical chief information officers do to get the most out of the new technology?
The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Executive Leadership summit last month attended by NHS CIOs and CCIOs, leaders from NHS England and NHS Digital and other health IT innovators, expressed the potential AI-driven data analytics has in supporting the NHS’s Five Year Forward View, narrowing gaps in health provision.
The summit discussed how AI could address the health and wellbeing gap by predicting which individuals most risk illness, allowing the NHS to target treatments accordingly, with AI giving health professionals and patients bespoke diagnostics and treatments. It was also noted that AI could help address the efficiency and funding gap by automating tasks, triaging patients to the most appropriate services and allowing them to self-care.
For AI to take such a critical role, we need the highest levels of data security, and we need faster, more actionable and linked data, linking the NHS’s disparate organisations. Speaking at the HIMSS summit, Amy Galea, deputy director, Transforming Health Systems, NHS England said: “The NHS is more like a collection of organisations. Linking data could give us the potential to be a truly National Health Service …(and) Integration is not just about merging services, it’s about understanding what different cohorts of people within a population need and then thinking about that pathway from beginning to end.”
The potential for linked data has been realised at the highest level. In a speech given last year, the prime minister challenged health charities, the NHS and the artificial intelligence (AI) sector to pool data to transform the diagnosis of chronic diseases, with the aim of using AI to prevent over 20,000 cancer-related deaths each year by 2033.
Some partnerships between AI global leaders and trusts can be highly effective. For example, Google DeepMind has collaborated with Moorfields Eye Hospital to develop and use an algorithm which identifies eye conditions.
And in pharmacy, the electronic prescription service (EPS) allows a GPs prescription to communicate with data driven AI to inform vending machine-like robots to dispense medicine with extraordinary speed and accuracy.
Pharmacy2U, the UK’s biggest online pharmacy, will be opening a new dispensing facility in Leicester which will bring the company’s dispensing capacity up to 7.5 million items per month, servicing the increasing demand for NHS repeat descriptions.
