‘GP in your pocket’ AI function necessary to meet patient demand, says NHS England

A new NHS App function giving ‘instant’ medical advice to patients using artificial intelligence (AI) is necessary to meet demand in general practice because the ‘money isn’t there’ to tackle it by other means, NHS England has said.

The commissioner’s digital products director Liz Clow argued that the NHS ‘cannot keep trying to solve the challenge of demand’ in general practice by using ways that have been tried before.

She was speaking at the event Digital Health Rewired in Birmingham today and, answering a question from Pulse, she said that the new AI function announced as part of the 10-year health plan is being piloted with ‘a couple of GP practices’ that were already procuring AI-enabled triage solutions to manage demand.

Last year, the 10-year plan announced the addition of an AI-enabled ‘My NHS GP’ tool – defined as a ‘doctor in the pocket of every patient’ – to the NHS App to handle non-urgent care enquiries by 2028.

It said that within the next two years, the app will be ‘a full front door to the entire NHS’ and that through the app, patients will be able to get ‘instant advice’ for non-urgent care and help ‘finding the most appropriate service first time’, through My NHS GP.

According to the plan, the feature would use AI-algorithms to ‘take a patient’s descriptions of their worries’ or symptoms, ask the ‘right follow-up questions’ and provide ‘personalised guidance’.

However, a recent Health Foundation survey of 8,000 patients and 2,000 NHS staff found fewer than half of respondents (49%) would use the feature.

When asked by Pulse about patients’ and clinicians’ hesitancy around the feature, Ms Clow said: ‘We’re starting small – at the moment, we’re piloting with a couple of GP practices that were already procuring AI-enabled triage solutions to manage the demand that they’re seeing.

‘This is something that the system is already looking for and wanting to try, because that demand challenge is here to stay. We can’t keep solving it in the same ways, the money isn’t there to solve it in the ways that have been done before.

‘This is about working with third party technology to work out what the right solution is. We’ll do that through qualitative user research and working with different groups until we understand enough to be able to put that into trials with very small groups of users, and start to scale that and get feedback through that quantitative mechanisms as well.’

It comes as chief medical officer Professor Sir Chris Whitty recently warned that GPs are increasingly having to start their consultations by ‘undoing’ incorrect information that AI has provided to patients.