At the Digital Healthcare Show 2024, Andrew Raynes, IT Director at Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, highlighted six actions NHS trusts should take on their AI journey.
In a keynote speech at the Digital Keynote Theater at ExCeL London, titled 'Avoiding the Hype: Digital Maturity is More Than Expensive AI', Raynes outlined six actions he believes are key to success of a trust’s AI journey. These were:
- Develop processes, systems and governance (clinical safety)
- Understand and prioritize AI opportunities and gain buy-in
- Nurture the deployment team, define key performance indicators and monitor impact
- Ensure data is clean, relevant and impartial – review/update policies
- Perform point-of-care testing, start small before scaling up
- Take steps to mitigate bias, ethics, privacy and security issues
Raynes' speech focused heavily on AI because “everyone is talking about it.” He posed the question of whether AI was a technological gold rush or a solution to a problem, before highlighting the obvious benefits.
He said integrating AI into clinical workflows will enable healthcare professionals to make important clinical decisions and provide better patient care while minimizing wait times. The CIO of Royal Papworth also explained that it allows clinical staff to analyze data and improve diagnoses, complete tasks more quickly and reduce repetition and medical errors.
In addition to highlighting the benefits of AI, he also dispelled three popular myths about AI: that it will replace humans in many jobs, that it understands and thinks like a human, and that it is always accurate and impartial.
Raynes also discussed cyberattacks in the healthcare industry, which he said he's “seen more of in the last few months than I care to remember.” Over the last year, cyberattacks on healthcare organizations have increased by 95%, he explained, with the healthcare sector being the third most affected sector by such attacks in the last quarter of the year.
Improve digital maturity by mastering the basics
Elsewhere on the show floor, on the first day of the event, in a session at the System Efficiency and Workforce Transformation Theater titled “Doing More with Less: Improving Digital Maturity with the Right Foundations,” Emma Hollings downplayed the phrase “digital maturity”, saying that “it was always a phrase that I found strange” and suggesting that it made the technology seem old.
The deputy director of planning and analysis at Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust was joined by Carolyn Crooks, associate director of transformation and delivery at Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust, in the session chaired by Neil Roberts, chief executive of Science & Engineering Health Technologies Alliance LTD. (SEHTA).
Crooks spoke about the Federated Data Platform (FDP) saying “everyone is talking about it at the moment”, while explaining that digital systems need to improve in trusts if patients are to have a best experience.
“I think patients are at a disadvantage because of the digital systems they trust,” she said. Crooks believes organizations need to find a way to extract the data, because that’s where the answers lie.
“All the answers to our questions lie in the data we have; we just have to figure out how to get it out.