Avoid unnecessary piloting of ‘excellent’ tech, says national CNIO

The NHS must “accelerate” and scale proven innovations to meet rising demand, England’s chief clinical nursing information officer told Digital Health Rewired.

Speaking at the conference in Birmingham on 24 March, Helen Balsdon said: “Our challenge is moving [from] excellence in pockets to something that is reproducible and scalable.

“Avoid unnecessary piloting because we already know it works.”

Balsdon was speaking in a session on building a pragmatic path to NHS innovation.

“We need to be really intentional about the technology we use and clear about problems we will solve,” she said.

Balsdon said that staff which her team had encountered on visits to NHS trusts were “struggling” to make the shift to an “AI world” when “there’s so much demand coming through the door”.

Technology, she argued, should deliver “personal care” — a goal she admitted seemed a “a long way away” for some NHS staff.

She also stressed the importance of involving the workforce in decisions about technology and prioritising innovations.

“We can’t do it all at the same time.

“Some of the people we need to take with us on our digital journey are our leadership colleagues, so we are not pulling them along,” she added.

Kate Warriner, chief information officer at Alder Hey Children’s NHS FT, said system working was “critical” to the successful implementation of technologies, adding that culture and leadership, including board-level commitment, was a “huge enabler”.

“We have permission to test and learn and improve,” Warriner said.

In a supportive culture, with a clinical safety focus, she said that technology adoption should be “fast”.

“Be brave. If it works, don’t mess around. Go for it,” she said.

‘Automated mansplaining’

Speaking in the same session, Nicola Millard, principal innovation partner at BT Group, warned that the increasing AI automation of everyday tasks could backfire by removing the easier parts of NHS staff’s workloads and depriving them of “the chance to breathe”.

There were also “worrying” signs that working alongside AI technology can de-skill clinicians over time.

“We need to keep basic skills fresh. If the technology fails, we still need those skills,” she said.

Millard, a psychologist by background, said that “genuinely exciting” large language models were also “weird”.

“We’ve never had a technology [before] that behaves a bit like us.

“They make stuff up. We have automated mansplaining,” she said.

Millard argued that humans needed to be “good parents” to AI systems to prevent them from drifting into behaviours that could cause harm, giving the example of a chatbot that “started to give dieting advice to anorexics”.

She warned that it is important to keep “humans in the loop.”