The NHS in England is to lead a world first pilot in Algorithmic Impact Assessments (AIAs) in healthcare to ensure potential risks such as algorithm biases must be addressed before they can access NHS data.

While artificial intelligence has the potential to support health and care workers to deliver better care for people, it could also exacerbate existing health inequalities if concerns such as algorithmic bias aren’t accounted for.

The pilot will complement ongoing work from the ethics team at the NHS AI Lab on ensuring datasets for training and testing AI systems are diverse and inclusive. Taken together, this will result in better health outcomes for everyone, and in particular minority groups.

It will be trialled across a number of the Lab’s initiatives and used as part of the data access process for the National Covid-19 Chest Imaging Database (NCCID) and the proposed National Medical Imaging Platform (NMIP).

Innovation Minister Lord Kamall said: “While AI has great potential to transform health and care services, we must tackle biases which have the potential to do further harm to some populations as part of our mission to eradicate health disparities.

“This pilot once again demonstrates the UK is at the forefront of adopting new technologies in a way that is ethical and patient-centred. By allowing us to proactively address risks and biases in systems which will underpin the health and care of the future, we are ensuring we create a system of healthcare which works for everyone, no matter who you are or where you are from.”