NEWS
UK Health
Secretary
announces
£250 million
investment in AI
British Airways resolves IT
system failure
A
new National Artificial Intelligence Lab
will use the power of AI to improve the
health and lives of patients.
The AI Lab will bring together the industry’s
best academics, specialists and technology
companies to work on some of the biggest
challenges in health and care, including
earlier cancer detection, new dementia
treatments and more personalised care.
AI is already being developed in some
hospitals, successfully predicting cancer survival
rates and cutting the number of missed
appointments. The AI Lab’s work could:
• Improve cancer screening by speeding
up the results of tests, including
mammograms, brain scans, eye scans
and heart monitoring
• Use predictive models to better
estimate future needs of beds, drugs,
devices or surgeries
• Identify which patients could be more
easily treated in the community, reducing
the pressure on the NHS and helping
patients receive treatment closer to home
• Identify patients most at risk of
diseases such as heart disease
or dementia, allowing for earlier
diagnosis and cheaper, more focused,
personalised prevention
• Build systems to detect people at risk of
post-operative complications, infections
or requiring follow-up from clinicians,
improving patient safety and reducing
readmission rates
• Upskill the NHS workforce so they can
use AI systems for day-to-day tasks
• Inspect algorithms already used by
the NHS to increase the standards
of AI safety, making systems fairer,
more robust and ensuring patient
confidentiality is protected
• Automate routine admin tasks to free
up clinicians so more time can be spent
with patients
The investment will support the ambitions in
the NHS Long Term Plan.
8
INTELLIGENTCIO
BA has recovered its systems from short-
term IT failure
B
ritish Airways (BA) has confirmed
that an IT system outage which
affected multiple short-haul flights has
been resolved.
The airline experienced an IT failure
on August 7, 2019 which led to the
cancellation of multiple flights from
London airports.
The company released an update on the
afternoon of the 7th, stating that the
temporary systems issue had been resolved.
It apologised to its customers who
were caught up in the disruption and
made reference to how frustrating their
experience must have been.
The company has since been able to
send the vast majority of customers on
their way, with most flights departing and
returning to normal. However, it warned of
a potential knock on operational disruption
as a result of the issue.
Michael Cade, Senior Global
Technologist, Veeam, commented: “Our
reliance on technology has hit a point
where it has an overwhelming influence
on consumer’s trust in a business – and
this IT failure is testament to the fact
that businesses are now expected to
provide uninterrupted access, protect
consumer data and recover quickly
should the worst happen.
“British Airways is not alone, this is
affecting businesses of all shapes
and sizes. Our recent Cloud Data
Management report showed that nearly
three-quarters (73%) of businesses
recognise that they still are still unable to
meet users’ demands for uninterrupted
access to applications and data. This gap
is causing business-critical challenges,
from damage to customer confidence
and brand integrity, right through to
losses of hundreds of thousands of
pounds an hour.
“It doesn’t matter if loss or lack of access
to data is caused by hardware failure, a
cyberattack, or even an employee gone
rogue. Customers will not care about what
caused an issue; they only want to know
if their data is protected and that they’re
still able to use services and applications
as normal without interruption and that
requires data availability.”
www.intelligentcio.com