The government is increasingly focused on innovation through a number of different initiatives and bodies. One focus area is personalised medicine, which has the potential to shift medical care from treatment to prevention, especially when combined with AI. However, the NHS often faces difficulties when integrating novel innovations into routine patient care.
To understand these difficulties, and identify possible reforms, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee has begun an inquiry into ‘Innovation in the NHS: personalised medicine and AI’. This article provides an overview of the inquiry and public call for evidence.
Personalised medicine is the ability to diagnose, treat and prevent conditions based on a patient’s own genomic, clinical and diagnostic information. This presents the potential for patients to understand their personal risk factors, receive an accurate diagnosis and begin the most effective treatment for them much quicker than where a ‘one size fits all’ approach is adopted. Despite this potential and the government’s desire to adopt personalised medicine more widely, there are difficulties with implementation, with a key factor being the high cost.
Personalised medicine is rooted in data, whether that is genomic or other clinical and diagnostic information. As a result, with the developments in AI, AI has the potential to automate the data analysis aspects of personalised medicine. This combination of AI and personalised medicine is clearly promising. However, there are challenges to overcome and the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee has begun an inquiry to consider these challenges further.
The inquiry into ‘Innovation in the NHS: personalised medicine and AI’ utilises the interplay between personalised medicine and AI, to consider more broadly why the NHS struggles to integrate innovations from the cutting edge of medical science with routine patient care. The ultimate goal is to work out what reforms could be implemented to unlock a relationship between research, clinical trials and NHS-wide delivery.
Some of the key topics that the inquiry aims to address include:
A public call for evidence has been published in association with the inquiry. The submissions are broadly divided into two main sections: (1) the science and technology and (2) deployment. More specific questions are then asked within the following sub-categories:
The call for evidence encourages anyone with expertise to make written submissions. This gives those working in health technology, AI, data analytics, genomics, digital health and life sciences the opportunity to inform parliament of their views.
Integrating novel innovations into routine patient care is a particular ongoing challenge for the NHS. It will therefore be interesting to see what changes are recommended following the inquiry and how the submissions may impact government policy. The progress of the inquiry can be monitored here.
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