Leeds Teaching Hospitals to deploy Newton’s Tree AI platform

Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has partnered with Newton’s Tree to deploy its vendor-neutral AI platform across the trust, allowing it to procure, integrate and monitor third party AI algorithms.

The partnership was formed in March 2024 and the platform will be deployed across clinical radiology in July 2024, with the first AI applications rolled out in September 2024.

Newton’s Tree is a health tech start-up that enables healthcare providers to procure, integrate, and monitor third party AI products through its AI platform.

The platform acts as the AI interoperability layer in the hospital, enabling hospitals to download AI applications with all the contracting and deployment built in.

Without a platform, each AI application requires individual installations which need separate monitoring.

Prof Andy Scarsbrook, consultant radiology and professor of clinical radiology at Leeds Teaching Hospitals, said: “Integrating the Newton’s Tree AI platform allows us to rapidly scale our ability to evaluate and implement AI applications.

“This will ensure we are able to enhance patient outcomes whilst ensuring these technologies are safe and effective. We are looking forward to developing prospective monitoring capabilities with Newton’s Tree in the coming months”.

Implementing the platform is intended to enable Leeds Teaching Hospitals to scale up its use of AI safely.

It is also hoped to improve patient safety by being able to objectively monitor the performance of AI, and alert hospitals to interview if something unusual is happening.

The AI platform is built on open standards and supports deployment and monitoring of AI software across all specialties. Newton’s Tree deploy whichever applications the hospital needs and are led by the problems the hospital need to solve.

The partnership with Leeds aims to set a benchmark for AI for integration in healthcare, demonstrating a scalable model that can be replicated across other NHS trusts.

Haris Shuaib, CEO of Newton’s Tree and NHS consultant clinical scientist, said: “Leeds Teaching Hospitals are ideal partners in our journey to help the healthcare system adopt AI in a safe and efficient manner.

“Being leaders in this space, Leeds has experienced many of the challenges our platform solves around AI implementation, and we’re excited to work with them as they scale their use of AI”.

Last month, analysis by Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust showed that it had saved an estimated 959 bed days in the first six months of a virtual ward service.