Briefing / Using artificial intelligence to unlock health records

Digital technologies such as digital medicine, genomics, artificial intelligence and robotics have a huge potential to transform the delivery of healthcare. These technologies can empower patients to participate actively in their care, with a greater focus on wellbeing and prevention. They also support the prediction of individual disease risk and personalise the management of long-term conditions. 

The HFMA, supported by Health Education England, is delivering a 12-month programme of work to increase awareness amongst NHS finance staff about digital healthcare technologies, and enable finance to take an active role in supporting the use of digital technology to transform services and drive value and efficiency. 

As part of the programme, the HFMA is publishing a series of case studies. Working with organisations who have started on the digital transformation journey, we will identify examples of good practice and highlight the challenges that services face. This will include specific challenges relating to NHS finance.

This case study describes how research teams from two biomedical research centres in London have used natural language processing - a form of artificial intelligence - to structure the large volumes of unstructured data in electronic patient records, so that the data can be used to support the delivery of high-quality care and clinical research. 

To find out more about HFMA’s Delivering value with digital technologies programme, click here.

If you have examples of digital transformation to share, please contact Catherine Mitchell, head of costing and value [email protected].