The pilot study is being run by researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London and University College London (UCL). The model could transform patient care, identifying opportunities where early interventions might significantly improve or save lives. Foresight, a generative AI model developed at King's out of the CogStack platform, learns to predict what happens next based on past medical events. It is similar to models like ChatGPT, which predicts sequences based on what it’s seen previously in data.

In this pilot study, Foresight is being trained on routinely collected, de-identified NHS data, like hospital admissions and rates of COVID-19 vaccination, to predict potential health outcomes for patient groups across England. These could be events such as hospitalisation, heart attacks or a new diagnosis. Predicting these events early could enable targeted intervention, shifting towards more preventative healthcare at scale.

The pilot operates entirely within the NHS England Secure Data Environment (SDE), a secure data and research analysis platform, that uniquely enables this groundbreaking work by providing controlled access to de-identified health data from the 57 million people living in England. Access to data at this scale is only made possible through the NHS England SDE, where both the AI model and all patient data remain under strict NHS control.

An earlier version of Foresight was previously trialled within two NHS Foundation Trusts (King’s College Hospital and South London and Maudsley) as part of a collaboration between King’s, UCL, the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) and NIHR UCLH BRC. The research, demonstrated its potential for predicting the health trajectory of patients by forecasting future disorders, symptoms, medications and procedures.

Source: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/ai-to-predict-healthcare-needs