The NHS AI Lab Skunkworks is looking to find, fund and resource the most promising AI experimentation in the health and care ecosystem. Giuseppe Sollazzo, Head of NHS AI Lab’s Skunkworks, urges NHS and HSC colleagues to consider their workplace problems and apply to pitch them in a Dragon’s Den-style event.

The AI Skunkworks team brings rapid innovation to health and care settings, applying AI technologies to problems that are genuine system issues that haven’t, historically, been a good match for non-AI solutions. Given the nature of the work, they need to be able to select real-life problems, and rapidly apply AI tech to try and solve them.

To do this, they are launching a new round of the AI Skunkworks Dragons’ Den-style pitching opportunity. In its previous incarnation, the open forum event crowdsourced its first projects from within NHSX, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and NHS England and Improvement (NHSE/I). This allowed the team to take problems from scratch to a proof of concept by applying some of the most innovative AI ideas.

Over last summer, teams were invited to explore their AI ideas with subject matter experts, and ideas were scoped and refined. The first ‘winner’ was Data Lens, a project that looked at how to bring different datasets together using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and other AI approaches, and the approach is proving successful. You can read more about Data Lens here.

They are inviting applications from health and care colleagues in arm’s length bodies (ALBs), public sector healthcare organisations and NHS & HSC Trusts. If you’re not sure if you meet this criteria, get in touch by emailing aiskunkworks@nhsx.nhs.uk.

Ideally, you will have a ‘problem’ that could be more than just local. Perhaps issues where time-consuming human resource could be alleviated, incompatible information could be more easily shared or where a prediction tool could resolve patient or work flow.

If successful, they will fund and resource the project. You’ll need to commit a product owner who understands the problem and can help navigate the levers required within the organisation. In return, you will get a delivery team to work together on a 12-week project.

To apply:

  • Email aiskunkworks@nhsx.nhs.uk for an application form.
  • Submit the application by 20 March 2021.
  • Be ready to attend on 1 April 2021.
  • The winner will be announced on 15 April 2021.
  • The project will run from April to August 2021.

You’ll need to come to them with a clearly defined problem statement or use case that meets a user need within the health and care system. This doesn’t have to be a clinical/diagnostic problem: in fact, they are very interested in projects that have an impact on operational processes and infrastructure (something often referred to as “fixing the plumbing”).

You should consider whether you can get access to the data needed for the problem and whether AI or data-driven technology could be a good candidate for the problem, or if there is potential in rethinking how the system delivers something.

The team is keen that each project will contribute to the wider knowledge base of AI in health and care, so you must commit to working in the open. They will be publishing blog posts and sharing information about the project as widely as possible, and the source code of data pipelines and the model (not the data itself, of course) will be released under an open licence.

Do you have an idea of what success looks like, and how it might be measured? For example, if the problem identified is that different trusts cannot share certain information, how will the impact of enabling this be measured? If it’s long waiting times, how will you measure any reduction, and further impacts such as saving costs? There will need to be data available to form a baseline that can be monitored to assess the impact of your project.

The Dragons’ Den-style event is just one of the pillars that form the foundation of the AI Skunkworks team and they will be announcing more initiatives in the next few months.

If you want to learn more about the AI Skunkworks team, visit the NHS AI Lab Skunkworks webpage and join the AI Virtual Hub on the FutureNHS platform where you can engage with members of the AI Skunkworks team.