Is the NHS ready for artificial intelligence?

Artificial intelligence is about to transform healthcare. The claim is not being made by excitable tech gurus from Silicon Valley but by medics. Machines, having been fed enormous amounts of data, are developing algorithms that detect disease from X-rays and tissue samples. This is, potentially at least, a much cheaper and more efficient way to diagnose patients. It has been predicted that it could ‘save the NHS’. In the field of genomics, too, AI is likely to have an enormous impact. The prospect is that, in the future, we could each have our genetic code on a chip that we scan in during a trip to the doctor, like a loyalty card at the supermarket. Its data would then inform our diagnosis or help determine our treatment.

But then there’s the NHS. All this talk about AI and genomics sounds a little utopian when most of us struggle to get an appointment with the GP and spend many hours waiting on any dreaded visit to A&E.