Over half (56%) of UK citizens do not trust the NHS to use AI to analyze patient data due to security and privacy concerns, according to research by VMware.
In addition, a quarter (25%) of the more than 2000 respondents to the VMware survey said they are completely against the NHS using AI to process their patient data.
The growing use of AI, placed firmly into public consciousness following the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool in November 2022, has raised a number of data privacy concerns. These include the role of AI in creating inferential data.
In addition, the data used to create and train large language models such as ChatGPT has come under scrutiny from data protection experts.
Dr Will Venters, Associate Professor of Information Systems, London School of Economics, told Infosecurity that the findings show that social as well as technical and legal barriers to the use of AI in the NHS must be overcome before the healthcare benefits of these technologies can be fully realized.
“We need patients to accept its use. Back in 2016 there was considerable controversy from Google’s DeepMind relationship and the Royal Free London NHS Trust’s sharing of data from 1.6 million patients. Avoiding such controversy and political backlash should be part of the overall security and privacy strategy for sustainable AI,” he explained.
Guy Bartram, Cloud Evangelist EMEA, VMware, added that education and transparency around how AI is used and its benefits should be a priority.
“People need educating in what new technologies like AI will be doing with their data and the NHS could go far by openly discussing and advertising their solutions and how they ensure national citizen data security is maintained, not doing so leaves room for doubt and will not gain trust,” he commented.
No tags.
