Charlotte Refsum to sit on data and tech group for 10 year plan

Exclusive: Dr Charlotte Refsum, director of health policy at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), has confirmed she will be part of the data and technology enabling working group for the government’s 10 year health plan.

The Department of Health and Social Care announced in November 2024 that the group will be led by Ming Tang, chief data and analytics officer for NHS England, and Dr Tim Ferris, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Speaking at an X-on Health event on AI and primary care at the King’s Fund on 21 November 2024, Refsum said: “I’m sitting on Ming Tang and Tim Ferris’ working group on data and technology but we haven’t yet agreed what the agenda is.”

Refsum talked about the need for agility to be built into the 10 year health plan, which is due to published in spring 2025.

“The combination of AI, genetics and all these things are coalescing together to speed up the rate of innovation, so how do health systems become agile enough to assimilate them?

“Think about this 10-year-plan, it’s perfectly possible that they may be able to cast their minds forward to 10 years’ time and see what the health system is like, but it’s going to be a guess.

“We just need to make sure that whatever we are building into this 10-year plan needs to build agility into it, so it’s able to adopt new innovations” Refsum said.

Refsum also discussed TBI’s  paper, ‘Preparing the NHS for the AI era, a digital health record for every citizen‘, published’ in August 2024, which proposed a programme to create digital health records (DHRs) for all UK citizens within five years.

“The title of the paper that we put out in August was ‘preparing the NHS for the AI era’ and that was completely deliberate, because I wasn’t talking about how the NHS prepares for AI. I think it’s slightly different.

“For me, it’s not just about health systems looking out there and horizon scanning and finding the best AI and inserting it into different parts of the health system, it’s about appreciating the fact that we’re entering into a totally different era.

“The world around the health system is changing, and so the features of the health system need to change to adapt to it,” Refsum said.

She added that AI could help meet global health challenges and cited examples of AI being used worldwide in population health management, to drive operational effectiveness in primary care, for clinical decision support and to support patients to manage their health.

“We’ve got demand exceeding capacity, and we know we need prevention to address capacity. We need productivity and underpinning all of that.

“I’m not saying AI is a silver bullet, but I’m saying it has a role to drive both prevention and productivity,” Refsum said.

Refsum will take part in a Rewired 2025 fireside discussion exploring how digital care records could enable integrated care and accelerate future health and care services.