The UK’s new GenAI health superpower

We’ve only just begun to tap into the predictive power of artificial intelligence in healthcare.

Today, I’d like to discuss an exciting step one country is taking to better harness generative AI for population health.

The UK NHS’ Foresight generative AI project is aptly named. The people behind it plan to revolutionize how the country anticipates—and responds to—a wide range of health threats.

Why is this GenAI model so exciting?

• It will be trained on de-identified health data from the 57 million people living in England.
• With all that data, it will predict health events ranging from hospitalizations to various new diagnoses.
• Broadly, this project shows us what is possible with AI model design when we feed it a large cache of centralized, standardized training data.

The NHS is a perfect setting for this kind of work.

• The UK’s centralized healthcare model, where the government funds and provides most of the country’s medical care, means public and population health data remain under NHS control.
• In contrast, a country like the U.S. faces a much harder challenge building such wide-spanning deidentified datasets because American healthcare—and its data—is so fragmented across regions, providers, and payers.
• Private companies like Truveta and Avandra attempt to help researchers bridge this gap by managing de-identified patient datasets.

Another boon for this project? The UK public trusts the NHS with their health data.