Artificial intelligence could revolutionise healthcare by allowing doctors to spend much more time with their patients, according to a leading health and technology expert at Microsoft. Dr Kenji Takeda, Director of Academic Health and AI Partnerships at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, told the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Heart and Circulatory Diseases that helping the medical sector is one of the most important uses of AI.
A survey by the group found that people in the UK support using more technology in the healthcare sector, with 85% of respondents backing the use of AI in diagnostics and treatment, and 86% saying they were happy for their anonymised health data to be shared to better diagnose medical conditions. Takeda was joined at an APPG event at the Houses of Parliament recently by Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock and Simon Gillespie, Chief Executive of the British Heart Foundation, among others.
A report they released revealed that there are seven million people living with heart and circulatory diseases, such as coronary heart disease and vascular dementia, in the UK and they cause a quarter of all deaths. It found that there was huge potential for AI to transform the lives of those people and a greater need for them to be included in discussions about the development and adoption of new technology.
Takeda, who is also a Visiting Industry Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute and Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton, highlighted a Microsoft project called EmpowerMD. This ambient clinical intelligence system captures conversations between doctors and patients, and integrates this with a patient’s electronic health records by synthesizing relevant information into the correct sections of a medical note.
This allows them to spend more time talking to patients and understanding their needs, and less time updating medical notes.
