Artificial intelligence is set to shape the healthcare market, delegates were told at an the Association of Medical Insurers and Intermediaries’ Health and Wellbeing summit.
AMII chairman Stuart Scullion says: “I believe the application of Artificial Intelligence will be the next big thing to hit healthcare, and we are seeing signs of that already.”
The keynote speaker, Babylon Health’s partnerships and clinical director Dr Umang Patel agreed. He told delegates: “We’re creating an artificially intelligent doctor built to mimic and augment a doctor’s training with the knowledge equivalent of 10-plus years of medical training and decades of practical experience.”
He says the company is looking to solve a range of healthcare challenges using AI, and will build on this flagship project in the next six to 12 months.
Patel outlined the challenges inherent in such a project, not least getting an AI doctor to understand the way patients use language to describe their symptoms, and how it interprets facial expressions.
AMII Compliance Partner Branko Bjelobaba, who has worked across the insurance sector for over 30 years, spoke on the latest and upcoming regulatory changes such as GDPR and IDD.
Meanwhile Matt James — who set up the Private Healthcare Information Network in 2012 —provided an update on the network’s progress and discussed the joint project with NHS Digital.
James talked through the integration of data on privately funded healthcare into NHS systems and standards for the first time through the Acute Data Alignment Programme (ADAPt).
As well as highlighting the various stages needed to create one standard and one system collecting data for measuring quality for all care, he also discussed how best this data can then be used.
He said: “There will be practical challenges in achieving this, but the principles are being accepted and direction of travel is moving forward. There are many ways we can then use this data to improve healthcare – publishing facts and figures on private healthcare, providing informatics for members and producing information for GPs to name a few.”