WIREDGOV

A new technology innovation centre opened at Great Ormond Street Hospital last week is intended to transform the use of technology including AI in healthcare & improve patient outcomes.

The state-of-the-art unit, called DRIVE – Digital, Research, Informatics and Virtual Environments  – is the first of its kind in the world.  It is both a physical & conceptual unit and is the result of a unique partnership between NHS Digital, Great Ormond Street Hospital, University College London and leading industry experts in technology, artificial intelligence and digital innovation.

The DRIVE unit will be a ‘hot-house’ for exploration activity, a rich environment for our technologists to work alongside industry & academic colleagues, and the launchpad for concepts which can be ‘scaled-up’ within our delivery programs or within regional and local technology programmes across the system.

We see the potential for deployment of cross-sector commodity technology across many different areas of our work.  Our first 3 areas of focus will be:

• The use of commodity integrated-communication technologies to drive collaboration across the system
• Exploring how best to gain from the explosion in ML, NLP and other AI technologies to enable better leverage of the hugely-rich data within the health & care system
• Exploring the use of commodity cloud data management and hosting services from hyper-cloud providers to deliver national platforms to facilitate alignment to NHS data standards