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uk Saturday 06 January 2018 Advertisement Artificial intelligence will enhance and personalise NHS care, says chairman of NHS England Sir Malcolm Grant says computers could enhance ability to diagnose illnesses and understand how to treat them better Sir Malcolm Grant, Chairman of NHS England Sir Malcolm Grant, Chairman of NHS England Photo: Rex Features By Victoria Ward 4:51PM BST 29 May 2015 Follow Artificial intelligence will bring NHS patients a greater quality of care by better diagnosing medical conditions and personalising medicine, according to the chairman of NHS England.
 Prof Sir Malcolm Grant said the health service would benefit hugely from the use of machine learning and robots, suggesting that if such technology could outperform humans, it would be daft not to use it.
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 He said diagnoses could only be strengthened with the use of computers to scan the wealth of information available through patients’ records in order to identify similarities.
 “I do believe that artificial intelligence and machine learning has the capacity to hugely enhance our ability to diagnose illnesses and to understand how to treat them better,” he said.
 [Artificial intelligence will bring NHS patients a greater quality of care by better diagnosing medical conditions] “This has an enormous potency to personalise medicine and to get us away from current practice where we tend to use one set of pharmaceutical products to benefit 20 or 30 per cent of the population.
” Increasing numbers of robots are being used in the NHS, taking jobs in some hospitals such as dispensing drugs and ferrying linen and food.
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 “By comparing this patient’s profile with of hundreds of thousands of other patients we can start to pick out what it might be that is causing the disorder is that we can see,” he said.
 [Artificial intelligence could be used to spot patterns and use each individual’s genomic structure] “For me, the overriding thing is that if a machine can outperform a human doing a task such as diagnosis, given the complexity of modern medicine, the complexities of modern science, why wouldn’t we use it?
 Why wouldn’t we use it to inform the human and to bring to our patients the greater quality and greater safety of care that I think AI really can achieve?
” Sir Malcolm, who last week took part in a panel discussion called Socioeconomic Impacts of Machine Learning at the Royal Society’s Machine Learning conference, said artificial intelligence could spot patterns and use each individual’s genomic structure to understand what would work best for them.
 He told the conference that around 50 per cent of morbidity was due to genetics, around 10 per cent was healthcare and 40 per cent largely down to lifestyle factors.