Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust (GOSH) has released its first ever AI strategy, highlighting the “unprecedented opportunity” AI presents for revolutionising healthcare delivery and enhancing clinical outcomes, driving efficiencies, reducing clinician burden, and improving patient care.
“Implementing AI-driven solutions will enable GOSH to increase the degree of personalised treatment we are able to provide, enhance clinical decision making and improve resource management,” the organisation states. “By building a scalable AI infrastructure and fostering both commercial partnerships and partnerships with academic institutions and other NHS organisations, we will develop a skilled AI team to drive this transformation. Importantly, we will also upskill and educate our wider workforce on safe and ethical AI use.”
In year one, governance, reporting, and monitoring structures will be developed, and a gap analysis will be undertaken to understand current capabilities, infrastructure, and use cases. A roadmap will be created based on the HIMSS Analytics Maturity Assessment Model (AMAM) framework, and the formation of an analytics council and a Department of Advanced Data Analytics and AI will support governance work. The trust also plans to launch pilots of AI solutions across diagnostics and administration, and to roll out AI literacy training for staff.
Years one to three will focus on scaling and optimising AI use, including in areas such as diagnostics, operations, and financial management. An AI monitoring system will be developed to track performance and ensure safety. AI research collaborations will be sought with NHS, industry, and academia, and the trust will work toward HIMSS AMAM Level 7.
Years three and beyond will centre around “full integration” of AI tech, and the implementation of AI-driven precision medicine at scale. GOSH also notes plans to deploy AI-powered robotic assistants for paediatric surgeries, and to take a “leading role” in AI collaboration with NHS organisations and academic networks.
In particular, the trust looks to AI-assisted diagnostics to support clinicians in decisions, including in AI-powered imaging, predictive analytics for early disease detection, personalised treatment recommendations, and enhanced patient monitoring.
AI technology for resource planning and efficiency will also be a focus for GOSH, with plans to introduce AI-based staff shift planning and surgery scheduling, along with predictive models to help forecast demand and bed occupancy. More work will be done with Ambient AI, following the trust’s pilot of TORTUS, which helped reduce consultation time per appointment by an average of 10 percent. Other planned initiatives include in the use of AI to provide summaries of care ahead of clinic visits or ward rounds, to provide suggested responses to patient messages, and to collate information from discharge summaries.
A pilot of CoPilot is also planned for 2025 to help streamline administrative workflows, automate data entry and document creation, and support efficiency by speeding up routine tasks, reducing errors and delays. Planned initiatives cover the prediction of patients at high risk of non-attendance to target reminder services, and the optical character recognition of scanned images and documents to gather information faster for audits.
Looking to enablers, the trust’s focus is on developing “a scalable AI infrastructure that integrates seamlessly with existing hospital systems”, including both cloud and on-premise services. Investment is required in the training and recruitment of AI specialists, data scientists, and clinicians with AI expertise, it states. A Centre of Excellence will be established to drive AI research and implementation across the hospital, whilst “stringent” controls and “robust” cybersecurity measures will ensure the safeguarding of patient data. This will also cover the use of advanced AI security tools to detect real-time anomalies and automate responses to threats.
GOSH also commits to adopting the principles outlined by the AI Playbook for the UK Government, that highlights the importance of lawful, ethical, and responsible use of AI through ensuring human control at key stages and managing the complete AI lifecycle. AI governance frameworks and policies for AI use will similarly be essential to the trust’s work around building trust, with plans to engage with key stakeholders and to maintain openness around AI processes and decision-making to foster trust and confidence.
Finally, GOSH commits to collaborating to drive AI research and innovation, sharing best practice and looking to AI modelling in predicting childhood disease, drawing on machine learning for a better understanding of paediatric genetic disorders and rare diseases, and clinical trial optimisation with AI-driven patient recruitment.
Benefits realisation work will see GOSH establish metrics and KPIs to track the impact of AI initiatives, with the trust committing to regularly review progress.
Wider trend: AI in driving efficiency and improving outcomes
Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust has also published an AI Strategy, outlining current and future AI work along with plans for benefits realisation, implementation, AI workforce development, infrastructure and data architecture. Driving the transformation are four key themes: enhancing children and young people centred care; empowering colleagues and freeing up time using intelligent automation, AI assistants, and smarter workflows; transforming outcomes for children and young people by delivering precision care through AI-optimised pathways, predictive analytics, and remote monitoring tools; and revolutionising paediatric diagnostics with “cutting edge” innovation.
For a HTN Now panel discussion on the reality of AI and managing bias in healthcare data, we were joined by panellists including Puja Myles, director at MHRA Clinical Practice Research Datalink; Shanker Vijayadeva, GP lead and digital transformation for the London region at NHS England; and Ricardo Baptista Leite, M.D., CEO at HealthAI, the global agency for responsible AI in health. The session explored topics including what is needed to manage bias; what “responsible AI” really looks like; how to ensure AI is inclusive and equitable; how AI can help support underserved populations; the deployment of AI in the NHS; and the potential to harness AI in supporting the shift from reactive to proactive care.
Teams from Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and the University College London Institute of Ophthalmology have developed an AI tool capable of predicting patients at risk of developing retinopathy, following use of a common autoimmune medication, said to be widely prescribed to treat rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and other autoimmune conditions.
