Tony Blair's plan to augment the NHS with Conversational AI

Tony Blair's plan to augment the NHS with Conversational AI
Screenshot of the Politico article

Former British PM, Tony Blair, is apparently very keen on the idea of using Conversational AI (or "chatbots") to help augment the National Health Service ("NHS") here in the UK.

This is according to this recent post in Politico. Here's a snippet:

“In time the primary-care landscape would change to one with far fewer groups of primary-care practices – and meaningful choice for patients over which group they register with,” the report says. 
POLITICO obtained a copy of the report, which was published on Friday apparently by accident, before it was deleted from the Tony Blair Institute’s website. The institute published the report Monday evening after being contacted by POLITICO
The report advocates creating a centralized store of digitized health records that could be used to power “AI doctors” that would interact with citizens through a chatbot.

I think there's a lot of value in the concept myself.

Indeed, when my wife has ever had to phone 111 (the non-emergency medical phone line) it appears to essentially be a human interface into a procedural set of defined advice approaches.

(The agreement in our house, by the way, is that she handles the medical aspects.)

She doesn't bother phoning the local doctor's surgery as they appear to permanently redirect you to the 111 medical service.

Why not make it a chatbot in the first instance? I think that would be very sensible.

I've already written about limited examples of where chatbots have made a difference in the medical world so I'd like to see a lot more experimentation and implementations in this area.

Here are some related posts I've written on the topic:

Gupshup’s telemedicine Conversational AI to support 800k Sudanese refugees
I picked up this press release from the team at Gupshup about a project they’re supporting to offer medical advice and support via WhatsApp to over 800,000 Sudanese refugees displaced by the challenges across Sudan. This is a great example of how Conversational AI technology can scale quickly and
EBO launches NHS chatbot
The whole process behind the National Health Service is crying out for more conversational AI services in my view. So it’s great to read that EBO has launched a Conversational AI virtual assistant for the Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust. Health Tech World has the full story: Lancashire
MindTalker: A Conversational AI to help Dementia sufferers
I think it’s important to cast a wide net here at Conversational AI News, so whilst I am obviously focusing on documenting as many interesting business applications as possible, I thought this one would be useful to note. It concerns the application of Conversational AI technologies in the medical field:

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