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Showing posts from September, 2017

Dr Demis Hassabis, Co-Founder and CEO of DeepMind, Speaks about AI in Healthcare

On 28 September 2017, I attended the Annual Institute of Global Health Innovation Lecture: Artificial General Intelligence and Healthcare, delivered by Dr Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind. Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines smart argued Dr Hassabis, so how can we make it improve the healthcare sector? Dr Hassabis then went on to describe the work that DeepMind was carrying out in healthcare in areas such as organising information, deep learning to support the reporting of medical images (such as scans and pathology slides), and biomedical science. Dr Hassabis also discussed the challenges of applying techniques such as reinforcement learning in healthcare. He concluded that artificial intelligence has great scope for improving healthcare; for example, by prioritising the tasks that clinicians had to carry out and by providing decision support aids for both patients and doctors. Dr Hassabis also discussed some of the ethical issues in using

Lambeth CCG 2017 Award for Outstanding Contribution to Primary Care

I was very honoured to have won the 2017 Lambeth CCG Award for Outstanding Contribution to Primary Care. Lambeth CCG noted that "Dr Majeed has made a huge contribution to primary care research knowledge as well as provide high quality, kind care to his patients. Dr Majeed was also recognised recently in Pulse magazine as one of the 50 most influential GPs in the UK."

We need activity-based funding and a more tightly defined contract for NHS general practices

In a letter published in the British Medical Journal , I respond to comments from Dr David Shepherd and Dr Hendrik Beerstecher about an editorial I wrote on shortages of general practitioners in the NHS. Dr Shepherd argues that capitation-based funding for general practice can work if the total amount of funding was increase and better methods were used to allocate funds to general practices. Dr Beerstecher argues that there is a mismatch between the supply of general practitioners and demand for their services. In my response , I state that that increasing the amount of funding for primary care would be a step forward. Moving from the current Carr-Hill formula for allocating budgets to general practices to a formula with more patient level clinical data would also be helpful. But case mix adjusted formulas such as the Johns Hopkins adjusted clinical groups (ACG) system have limitations—particularly when used for smaller populations such as those covered by the typical NHS general p