The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has outlined how it is exploring artificial intelligence (AI) to safeguard public health. It said this includes leveraging AI both directly through deployments, and indirectly by using the technology to enhance business productivity.
In a report to its Advisory Board, UKHSA said it has expanded its portfolio of public health use cases delivered by technical specialists in Chief Data Officer (CDO) Group working closely with subject matter experts.
In addition, it has commenced an internal evaluation of i.AI’s Redbox, a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) application that uses gen AI to chat with and summarise civil service documents. It is designed to handle a variety of administrative sources, such as letters, briefings, minutes, and speech transcripts. UKHSA said the application is being piloted on publicly available information while it seeks approval to use sensitive documents.
At an enterprise level, UKHSA said it has completed an initial small-scale trial of M365 co-pilot in CDO Private Office and is developing plans to expand this trial in several other areas, including incident response
UKHSA also revealed examples of successes of AI solutions that are in use, or currently being piloted.
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In collaboration with UK universities, UKHSA toxicologists have installed and are live-testing a cutting-edge commercial system integrating advanced data analytics with AI to detect airborne pollen in real-time. Combining sampling and analysis through automated imaging and AI technologies drastically reduces the time lag between sample collection and analysis from days or weeks to minutes. This allows for higher resolution, and more timely alerts, for key aeroallergen levels.
UKHSA said data will be gathered over the next 12 months. If tests prove successful, this technology has the potential to allow allergy sufferers and healthcare providers to better manage symptoms and/or prepare for high demands on health services.
Elsewhere, AI is being deployed in the tuberculosis (TB) screening programme. The programme in the UK invites new migrants for testing based on country of birth. Country of birth is taken from GP registration records. However, UKHSA noted this information is often messy with incomplete data, misspellings, or ambiguous place names. This meant a manual review of about 40,000 records was needed each year.
Using AI can speed up this review by matching messy data to countries more quickly and in an automated manner. AI is shown to have 90 percent accuracy on deriving a country of birth and reduces the number of records that require full manual review to about 6,000 per year, representing an 85 percent reduction in manual effort. The system has now been integrated into the TB team’s regular workflow, and an Algorithmic Transparency Reporting Standard (ATRS) submission on the tool is being prepared.
“The agency continues to believe that AI represents a significant opportunity to more effectively deliver its mission to safeguard public health,” UKHSA said in the report.
