Whichever side of the political aisle you sit, we all agree public health waiting lists are too long. Given an overwhelming number of health issues can be treated by oneself, could AI be the answer to the challenges we face in finding the right solutions for self-care treatment?
Shortly before the breakout of COVID-19, the NHS published a staggering report which revealed that 80% of health issues in the UK can be treated by patients themselves. The same report stated that nearly 60 million GP consultations were for minor ailments, which could have been self-diagnosed and self-managed.
Then the pandemic struck, causing unprecedented disruption across the UK’s healthcare system. Waiting lists in England soared to 7.2 million at the end of October 2022 and have still not recovered. The latest figure provided by NHS England in June 2024 was over 7.5 million.
To address this, ahead of their victory in the 2024 General Election, the Labour Party pledged to “build an NHS fit for the future” that will harness AI to transform diagnostic services.
AI has unquestionable potential to revolutionise the speed and accuracy of these services, but it also has the potential to revolutionise self-care outside of the NHS, a process which has already begun.
More people are turning to AI when it comes to their health
Amidst the long waiting lists, and pharmacies shutting down across the UK, many struggle to find the right self-care treatments as a result of an overload of information on search engines like Google or Bing. Where do you even start? What pages can you trust? When is self-care appropriate? When do we need in-person care?
Whilst patients are increasingly turning to self-care, there are still challenges, with nearly one in four of 25 to 34 year-oldssaying they turn to a GP for a self-treatable condition rather than applying self-care measures or consulting a pharmacist.
AI can serve as a solution.
Recent research conducted by pharmaceutical company STADA, Thornton & Ross showed that more than 1 in 10 of us are already turning to AI for health advice and solutions.
As Nigel Stephenson, General Manager at STADA, Thornton & Ross said, it’s “reassuring” to see people becoming more open to involving technology in their health as they look for quicker and easier ways to access treatment.
This is a trend healthwords.ai can testify to. In 2024 alone we have seen the number of patients using our platform more than double, having increased by 222%.
Supporting the healthcare system
Leveraging AI as a growing solution to addressing self-treatable health issues does not only overcome the accessibility issues for patients, but also relieves pressure on the NHS. An estimate by the Consumer Healthcare Association shows that GP appointments for self-treatable conditions costs the NHS a shocking £810 million per year.
For many, pharmacies also serve as a source of medical advice, and the Pharmacy First initiative, launched earlier this year, now offers limited consultation services to improve accessibility.
Pharmacies, however, are under growing pressure, particularly as high street closures continue across the UK but AI-powered technologies can act as an additional tool in building a stronger and more well-rounded healthcare ecosystem.
Reliability and accuracy of AI-powered health care platforms is essential
If speed and ease of access are important when it comes to digital health care platforms, reliability and accuracy are critical. Adequate solutions, however, are limited.
Most digital-led consumer health platforms are modelled on decision trees and therefore limited in their ability to converse with patients. Meanwhile, the more well-known large language models are notorious for providing wildly inaccurate advice.
For instance, researchers at Long Island University in New York posed 39 medication-related queries to ChatGPT and found that the platform only provided accurate answers to around 25% of them when compared to those answers written by trained pharmacists.
How specialised AI can ensure the most accurate outcome for its users
To trust AI with our health, the algorithms need to be trained on curated medical content, verified by medical professional, unlike the web-scraping models such as ChatGPT.
For AI to effectively support patients and relieve the healthcare system, it needs to be able to converse like a medical professional. This is an approach we advocate for and have taken on at healthwords.ai, with the average number of messages per conversation on our platform reaching over 20.
Patients start a ‘conversation’, like you would with your pharmacist, that probes and presses to reach the best outcome, whether that be general advice, an OTC product directly purchased on the platform, or direction towards an in-person consultation.
These conversations are then reviewed by medical professionals who confirm that the advice and products precisely match the consumers’ diagnoses.
To improve accuracy and efficiency, AI-driven health platforms can also leverage personalization, which we are currently looking to launch on our own platform.
Digital platforms are well-suited to handle the more sensitive areas of self-care
Digital platforms could also be the best means to treat those issues people typically feel uncomfortable talking about in-person.
Research agency OnePoll recently surveyed 2,500 adults in the UK of whom less than 6 in 10 said they feel comfortable discussing personal health issues with other people, even if that’s with a medical professional.
Anonymised data from our platform, however, shows how much more our users feel comfortable discussing sensitive issues online, with women’s health, mental health and sexual health accounting for a remarkable 25% of all activity on healthwords.ai.
Available 24/7 and free for all
Like the NHS, AI can provide 24/7 availability free for all, but platforms like ours are not a like-for-like substitute.
Whilst the NHS excels in offering in-person medical treatment, we are on a mission to offer quick, easy, and reliable solutions to patients with issues that can treat themselves.
It is time we harness the power of AI to make self-care easier, more accessible, and more accurate for consumers. We believe now is the opportunity to build a future-proof healthcare system, that utilises the abilities of AI-powered technologies to cut waiting lists and saving the NHS millions of pounds. Let’s champion self-care.
