Charlotte Refsum will work in the Data and Technology team over the 10-year plan

Exclusive: Dr Charlotte Refsum, director of health policy at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), has confirmed she will be part of the data and technology working group for the government’s 10-year health plan.

In November 2024, the Department of Health and Social Care announced that the group would be led by Ming Tan, chief data and analytics officer at NHS England, and Dr Tim Ferris, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Speaking at the X-on Health event on artificial intelligence and primary care at the King’s Fund on 21 November 2024, Refsum said: “I’m part of the Ming Tang and Tim Ferriss working group on data and technology, but we haven’t agreed yet . what is the agenda.”

Refsum spoke about the need to include flexibility in the 10-year health plan, due to be published in the spring of 2025.

“The combination of artificial intelligence, genetics and all these things are coming together to accelerate the pace of innovation, so how can health systems become agile enough to assimilate them?

“Think about this 10-year plan, it’s possible that they could look 10 years into the future and see what the health care system is like, but that would just be a guess.

“We just need to make sure that whatever we build into this 10-year plan needs to be flexible and able to accommodate new innovations,” Refsum said.

Refsum also discussed the TBI document ‘Preparing the NHS for the age of artificial intelligence, a digital health record for every citizen’, published ‘in August 2024’, which proposed a program to create a digital health record (DHR) for all UK citizens within five years.

“The title of the article we put out in August was ‘Preparing the NHS for the Age of AI’ and that was quite deliberate because I wasn’t talking about how the NHS is preparing for the Age of AI. I think it’s a little different.

“For me, it’s not just about healthcare systems looking to the future, scanning the horizon, finding the best AI and implementing it into different parts of the healthcare system, but also appreciating the fact that we are entering a completely different era.

“The world around health care is changing, and so health system functions must change to adapt to it,” Refsum said.

She added that AI can help solve global health problems and cited examples of AI being used around the world in population health management, to improve the operational efficiency of primary care, to support clinical decision making and to support patients in managing their health.

“We have demand exceeding capacity, and we know we need proactive measures to address the capacity issue. We need performance and support for all of this.

“I’m not saying AI is a panacea, but I am saying it has a role in both prevention and productivity,” Refsum said.

Refsum will take part in the discussion of Rewired 2025 exploring how digital care records can provide integrated care and speed up future health and care services.