Tony Blair's plan to augment the NHS with Conversational AI
Former British PM, Tony Blair, is apparently very keen on the idea of using Conversational AI (or "chatbots") to help augment the National Health Service ("NHS") here in the UK.
This is according to this recent post in Politico. Here's a snippet:
“In time the primary-care landscape would change to one with far fewer groups of primary-care practices – and meaningful choice for patients over which group they register with,” the report says.
POLITICO obtained a copy of the report, which was published on Friday apparently by accident, before it was deleted from the Tony Blair Institute’s website. The institute published the report Monday evening after being contacted by POLITICO
The report advocates creating a centralized store of digitized health records that could be used to power “AI doctors” that would interact with citizens through a chatbot.
I think there's a lot of value in the concept myself.
Indeed, when my wife has ever had to phone 111 (the non-emergency medical phone line) it appears to essentially be a human interface into a procedural set of defined advice approaches.
(The agreement in our house, by the way, is that she handles the medical aspects.)
She doesn't bother phoning the local doctor's surgery as they appear to permanently redirect you to the 111 medical service.
Why not make it a chatbot in the first instance? I think that would be very sensible.
I've already written about limited examples of where chatbots have made a difference in the medical world so I'd like to see a lot more experimentation and implementations in this area.
Here are some related posts I've written on the topic:
Ewan MacLeod
Ewan MacLeod
Ewan MacLeod
