Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the cost has been to date of deploying AI systems in A&E departments; and what estimate his Department has made of the cost of a national rollout.

To date, the Department has not undertaken any formal assessment or estimate on the cost or value of the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to predict levels of demand in accident and emergency departments.

Decisions regarding the adoption and deployment of AI tools, including those used for demand prediction in accident and emergency settings as discussed in the article ‘Faster treatments and support for health workers as AI tackles accident and emergency bottlenecks’, are made at a local level by individual National Health Service trusts. At present, NHS trusts have autonomy to determine the use of such technologies, taking into account the needs and priorities of their respective organisation, independent of the Government. As such, we do not have a cost estimate of a national rollout, nor can we confirm the procurement processes used by those organisations.

The implementation of the AI tools discussed in the article ‘Faster treatments and support for health workers as AI tackles accident and emergency bottlenecks’ did not involve an individual procurement of third-party goods or services for the accident and emergency tool, which was developed in the Federated Data Platform. AI implementation programmes that do involve the procurement of third-party goods, services, or digital products are managed in compliance with the obligations set out in the Procurement Act 2023, and the relevant NHS contracting authorities' standing financial instructions.