AI in the NHS to improve patient journey and outcome

When a patient first presents at the NHS - generally either through a GP or Accident and Emergency, their correct journey through treatment and services is absolutely essential for a successful therapeutic outcome, as well as for the NHS to provide their services within time and budget. Generally the patient journey involves Diagnosis, Treatment, Recovery, Referrals, Second Opinion and Private Options, in various orders.

As part of the NHS Long Term Plan published on 7 January 2019, Chapter 5 focusses on Digitally-enabled care and includes systems such the Electronic Prescription Service (EPS).

AI lends itself extremely well to making the entire patient journey more efficient, as well as granularising each process within each journey portion.

AI simply needs to know e.g. the presenting symptoms, the journey steps and the outcome. Using past data to learn from, the Artificial Neural Network will make the relationships between all journey steps and learn what leads to a successful or unsuccessful patient journey outcome.

The alternative approach used currently is a traditional software, step-wise methodology which by definition is not up to the task in hand - it is told what to do at every stage via multiple database queries as opposed to learning for itself.

When the AI Model has learnt/is trained, it can then be used to predict the outcome at every stage, thus influencing the next step via decision intelligence and increasing the likelihood of a successful outcome.

Moreover, the same AI Model can provide recommendations at each journey point. It does this by a processing known as Embedding. AI recognises pathway points that are similar.

Furthermore, AI can easily provide overall Insights. It does this by processing each individual input (journey point or symptoms etc) on its own to see how each individually positively or negatively affects the outcome.

Combined, using AI to learn from past patient journey data where a known outcome is prescribed, AI can greatly increase efficiency through accurate predictions, recommendations, insights and decision intelligence.

Fennaio is offering eldr.ai for use in the NHS.