Rammya Mathew: Could artificial intelligence be the key to transforming general practice?

In the recent budget Jeremy Hunt, chancellor of the exchequer, announced £3.4bn of additional capital investment for the NHS, with emphasis on using this to improve technology and enable digital transformation across the health service. There’s clearly an ambition to increase automation and to use machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve diagnosis and personalise treatments. The hope is that this will substantially increase productivity in an ailing NHS.I’ve been considering what automation will look like in general practice. I don’t see our role as GPs being taken over by bots any time soon, not only because the technology isn’t sufficiently developed but because general practice is almost entirely relational. Patients come to see us because they want to feel heard and cared for, and they trust us as their family doctor. I think that this will continue to be the case even if machines can theoretically beat us…
Read Original Article: Rammya Mathew: Could artificial intelligence be the key to transforming general practice? »