A Leeds-based specialist technology business has been named as a winner at a national awards
ceremony billed as the ‘Oscars of the IT industry’.
Answer Digital, picked up the Artificial Intelligence Project of the Year award after being nominated for
its pioneering work in advancing AI, accelerating the diagnosis of cancer, stroke and other health
conditions in the NHS, at the prestigious UK IT Industry Awards 2023. The award came in the project
excellence category.
Answer Digital is working with The London Medical Imaging and AI Centre for Value-Based Healthcare, a
consortium of 10 NHS Trusts, to deploy a multi-modal AI platform that supports clinicians with faster
and more accurate diagnosis and treatments, personalised therapies, and effective screening across
various conditions and procedures.
‘AIDE’, the AI Deployment Engine, is a unique platform designed to implement AI at scale within the
NHS. As an intelligent multi-modal platform, it increases the potential benefit of AI by creating a single
interface for the deployment of many different AI tools, directly to NHS frontline services.
FLIP enables data from multiple NHS trusts to be used to train new AI models for future clinical use using
privacy-preserving Federated Learning technology so that the patient data never needs to be pooled or
shared outside of the originating NHS trust.
Based on the ongoing success at Kings College Hospital, AIDE has subsequently been rolled out in six
NHS Trusts, proving itself as an effective channel for widespread AI deployment across the NHS to
benefit patients.
The work is paving the way for AI-enabled hospitals and the future of patient care. Federated learning is
being employed to address the long-standing issues surrounding privacy, security and anonymity when
collating the large volumes of sensitive patient data traditionally required to teach machines.
Sophisticated AI algorithms from NHS medical images and patient data provide tools for clinicians to
speed up and improve diagnosis and care across several patient pathways, including strokes, dementia,
heart failure and cancer.
The platform receives a live stream of medical imaging data, allowing clinicians to access near real-time
AI analysis within seconds. Once an AI has analysed the clinical data, the results are sent to the
electronic patient record to support clinical decision-making.
In developing the award-winning solutions, Answer leveraged its cloud capabilities and understanding of
NHS Trust landscapes to create a hybrid cloud/on-premise architecture that delivers value for money,
innovation and rapid delivery.
Richard Pugmire, director at Answer Digital, commented: “The award is fantastic recognition for the
hard work of the Answer team. We have developed a very close partnership with the NHS on what has
become a nationally significant innovation that advances personalised and digitally-enabled healthcare
provision across the whole service.”
“The AI programme allows Answer to bring the best technical, clinical and academic minds together to
deliver a solution, capable of changing the way healthcare is provided for many years to come. Given the
expertise of the partners involved and the nature of AI as a tool, the whole project has the capacity to
be truly transformative for the NHS.”
Held in Battersea, London, the UK IT Industry Awards 2023, brings together industry leaders and
innovators to celebrate the top achievements in the tech world over the last 12 months. The annual
event emphasises acknowledging brilliance and innovation with more than thirty awards distributed,
highlighting exceptional projects, companies and individuals shaping the tech landscape.
