The reason i'm writing this is to challenge the recent decision made by the UK government in which they withdrew from google’s Deepmind research study. Back in early 2015 google brokered a deal with the national health service which allowed google to access confidential patient files to study different medical conditions, and how these innovations in the field of AI could help take the strain off doctors & medical staff when it came to making low risk to life altering decisions about patients in their care. The article below describes the outrage that the British population voiced towards the news and the consequences the illegal act caused..
Personally when it comes to the NHS it's been well documented that it's in dire straights and I feel the general population should be more open to the idea of sharing data as long as it's anonymised when given to researcher, which is what normally happens in medical based studies. Recently a study argued that security challenges that were holding up the access to this type of sensitive information could be overcome, despite all the bad publicity that was previously encountered during the 2015 fall out.
In the recent study it they set out a roadmap on how Britain should become a world leader in AI and how health records should be shared with private firms to improve care within the NHS. subjects also covered included the development of smarter scheduling systems, operations in hiring the right staff for the job to hiring on-demand self-driving cars. Experts are calling for new policies and systems that help anonymise the data about people's health and lifestyles, which they argue will aid private technology companies as well as themselves.
When it comes to my medical records personally speaking I have absolutely no objections to leasing, selling or giving access for free if it will truly benefit the overall picture of AI within the national health service. I understand and feel people's frustrations with this as it's a massive breach to the personal rights but I don't think this was done with bad intentions. I truly believe that they were trying to develop tech faster with the assistance of google.
The most interesting use case of having an advanced AI would be in the proposed Your.MD application you can use to find out if you really need to go to a hospital. At the moment in 6 out of 10 cases the app currently recommends that you should see a GP and in 4 out of 10 cases it recommends that you attend a hospital as soon as you can. However if an advance AI was able to look at your records and make assumptions on your symptoms could massively reduce the level of people that are attending hospitals nationwide if it can understand you on a deeper level using all of the past data.
In good news when it comes to this issue after last year ministers scrapped the care data plan link to GP records after that last outcry from the public. The department of health promised that any new medical records would include an opt out clause so if you wished that your data stayed within the NHS it would. This is a promising proposition as this will allow IT and the tech sector to access massive data sets of medical information that will aid the development of AI within the field.
I will finish this off with saying that I feel that AI will drastically improve the quality of the HNS from patient numbers to staff relief, as intelligent decision making on life or death subjects can be properly studied to see the moral implications of using such systems to make these decision. Alot needs to be done but I sense there is going to be a massive shift of resources spent in this area of study over the next five to ten years which is outstanding. I will leave some quite facts on how different fields are being affected by the introduction of his new type of technology.
Whats happening in AI
“Other areas where AI is being used, but could be expanded, included:
- Banking – HSBC has created a chatbot, Olivia, who can assist customers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year with their enquiries.
- Education – A platform called Century is helping teachers to provide more personalised education programmes and receive feedback.
- Legal services – AI is helping lawyers to do legal searches and to draft the best standard documents.
- Travel – Companies are developing fully autonomous operating systems that diagnose potential problems for driverless cars and identify the most logical routes.” - http://www.independent.co.uk
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