Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if she will take steps to ensure that (a) clinical and (b) other data held by (i) the NHS and (ii) her Department is used to help identify poor clinical practice in the NHS; and if she will make an assessment of the potential merits of using (A) AI and (B) machine learning to identify such concerns.

Machine learning is in active use in the national patient safety learning system, known as the Learn from Patient Safety Events service, which has been rolled out across the National Health Service in England. The service provides a modern platform upon which technological advances such as machine learning can now operate. Named Entity Recognition is already aiding in the anonymisation of records, so that they can be used for learning activities without risk of identification of individuals.

Ongoing work is also being undertaken to explore how machine learning can support the analysis of data relating to patient safety events captured from across healthcare, and to look at how machine learning can identify new, emerging, and under recognised risks to patient safety. Future plans are also in place to enable support for the automated theming of unstructured free text, which will lay the foundations for targeted topic-specific improvement and guidance.