Tech is at the heart of the NHS’ organ donor recruitment drive

And - will AI become the health service’s lifeblood?

Moving to the cloud is unlocking new efficiencies and technologies for NHS Blood and Transplant, says deputy CIO and CISO Phil Chatterton.

We don’t often think about blood until we need it. But behind every transfusion, transplant, and emergency surgery is NHS Blood and Transplant – the service quietly keeping the system alive.

Its mission is critical and complex: deliver a safe, steady supply of blood and organs to the NHS. But that mission is under pressure. Demand is rising, donors are dwindling, and like much of the public sector, it’s being asked to do more with less.

“Within the UK, at any one point in time, about 8,000 people are waiting for an organ... [But] when people die, there's normally only a 1% utilisation of donation from there,” said Phil Chatterton, deputy CIO and CISO at NHSBT, when we met at Oracle Cloudworld London earlier this year.

That means you’re more likely to be waiting to receive an organ than donating one.

While this isn’t solely an IT problem, tech has a role to play in removing the barriers from donation.

"We really need systems which can scale,” said Phil, pointing to the recent (completed three weeks before Cloudworld) migration of the National Transplant database from on-prem to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The move is intended to unlock new levels of flexibility, security and environment management.

“We may not have transformed it much at the moment, but we're on that journey now. We're in an environment where we can start to leverage the good of cloud, which on an on-premise legacy system we can't do.”

And the benefit won’t only be felt in the backend. At least, that’s the plan.

“There's a want in the organisation to move towards being able to really digitise the whole journey between donation and patient, so that we get a lot more focused, almost forensic, response to the needs of a patient.

“Can we get the right organs, or the blood or donation, from the right person to the right patient in the right time? That's absolutely crucial. The challenge is you've got to do that whilst managing the existing system, which is based on a more clunky mechanism than we've got [available] today.”

Like other areas of the NHS, NHSBT is experimenting – cautiously – with artificial intelligence, with OCI as an enabler. The intent is all about making blood and organ donation faster and easier, and the organisation has put “a lot of work” into doing more of the screening up-front. It hopes that work will make it more agile in its ability to assess, accept and reject donations.

“We've also explored how we can use AI to help us plan donation sessions better, so we get the absolute best from our side, but also from our donors in each of those very valued sessions.

“That's shown that, for example, on the donation stuff, we can increase the productivity of the donation sessions by 7% just by introducing AI into the calculation method of how we plan them. So that's early days, and that's very early stuff. What we now need to move to is, how do you industrialise that?”

Answering that won’t be easy, but the government’s AI Playbook provides a starting point, acknowledging the public sector’s desire for AI while also trying to establish guidance on its safe and effective use.

It’s in NHSBT’s interest to set up comprehensive AI frameworks as early as possible, because “the challenge with AI is it comes in anyway.”

“Even if you don't do this stuff, the world’s not going to stand still. People are going to start using it. It's going to be embedded into products in the future. So, there's a sort of real urgent need for [these controls].”

NHSBT is set to deepen its partnership with Oracle. As well as assessing the latest AI tools, it also wants to modernise its Blood Stocks Management System. Stay tuned to Computing to find out more about that project as it moves forward.