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Despite leaving office nearly two decades ago, Tony Blair remains in the spotlight as an influential voice in politics and in the tech sector.
The former Prime Minister has written his first book in over a decade, On Leadership. It contains a section focussing on the “technological revolution” which he believes is “THE issue of our times [sic]”.
This is an issue Blair has spoken on regularly in recent years, particularly focussing on the transformative potential of generative AI and other technologies for healthcare.
However, On Leadership is his most detailed and provocative intervention into the debate yet.
It’s well known that Blair advises new Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and that his think tank, The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, has helped develop and steer the new government’s policy.
In a speech last week, Starmer highlighted AI as an area of focus for the government in the next six months, so it’s likely that we’ll see at least some of Blair’s approach come into fruition in the UK soon.
Here are the key points Blair makes on healthcare, the technological revolution and AI.
Healthcare systems should become more preventative
“A health service’s fundamental purpose should be to stop them [patients] becoming ill in the first place” says Blair.
He suggests doing this by using technology to identify predispositions to diseases and conditions before birth, sequence everyone’s genome, and to introduce regular data driven health checks.
“Healthcare systems across the world need to move to a preventative model if they are to deliver good outcomes amid an ageing population. It is a positive thing that there is a wider public debate happening about shifting to this kind of model of healthcare” says Mikkel Kristiansen, CEO of VentriJect, the Danish MedTech company behind a new medical device and digital app for estimating VO2 max.
“We can use innovative new technologies to gain a more detailed picture of an individual’s health and alert clinicians to improvements and deteriorations in their condition – this will empower patients to understand more about their own health and help with hospital and care planning.”
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Drug development is about to accelerate rapidly
Medicines “could be brought to market at almost infinitely greater scale and speed, with goal shots multiplied a hundredfold” thanks to AI, which will massively increase the speed of trials and leave the pharmaceutical industry “disrupted but in a wholly beneficial way” according to the former Prime Minister.
He suggests that instead of taking years of vastly expensive research and development, AI and other new technology will allow much more accurate predictions for whether drugs are likely to work at an earlier stage, saving huge financial and time investments.
“Blair is right to highlight this as a potential game changing moment pharmaceutical industry” says Professor Andy Whiting, CEO of neurodegenerative drug discovery company Nevrargenics and Emeritus Professor at Durham University.
“The biggest inhibitor of drug discovery has been the huge investment required, with trials taking many years to produce results and indicate whether a drug is effective.
“If AI is able to speed up this process, we’ll see more drugs being discovered and put on the market faster than ever before, which will transform our chances of discovering game changing drugs. We have already started to investigate how AI can be applied to our own research, which is tremendously exciting.”
The digitalisation and democratisation of data will transform research
Blair is perhaps his most provocative when discussing data and privacy. He suggests that biometric data should be given to government as part of a Digital ID, which would be used to access healthcare services.
While clear that secure systems are essential to protect such data, he does not believe that digitalising such a vast amount of data would create a privacy risk: “Your average person gives more information to Facebook, TikTok, online shopping and entertainment than they would ever need to give to government.”
This is not a new topic for Blair, who has previously advocated selling anonymised NHS data to fund future technological developments, which would make data more accessible to researchers and allow for faster medical research.
Dr Craig Currie, Chief Scientific Officer at Human Data Sciences, who use cutting-edge computational techniques to rapidly analyse anonymous patient data, agrees with Blair’s suggested approach.
“The compilation of disparate sources of people’s healthcare data into single repositories is an inevitable next step for healthcare systems across the world. Only by doing this, and in a controlled way to protect people’s anonymity, can society benefit from the advances in technology that include better disease prevention, treatment optimisation, cost efficiency, and improved patient experience.
The rapid application of machine learning and AI techniques could accelerate medical research advances that would ordinarily take many months or years to elicit. At HDS we already use complex, anonymous health data from various sources for research purposes. Automation of common types of data analysis, and a move to rapid in silico studies should be transformative.”
The revolution is coming, whether you like it or not
“We are living through a twenty-first-century technological revolution that is transforming the way we work, live, interact…and it is doing so in as powerful and all-encompassing a way as the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution” explains Blair.
He sees this as an opportunity for radical change for the better, particularly in the healthcare industry and particularly for small scale entrepreneurs with innovative ideas which previously would not have had the resources or support to get off the ground.
However, the former Prime Minister does recognise that there will be casualties of the “revolution”, those who fail to adapt and rethink their business model as AI and technology supersedes them.
To these people, he has a blunt message: “The answer…is not to resist or deny the revolution, but to understand it fully, to access its opportunities and mitigate its risks.”
“It’s encouraging to see a major figure recognising the potential of the health tech industry at such a critical time” says Yogan Patel, Head of MedTech at accountancy and advisory firm MHA.
“This is a sign of how important digital health entrepreneurs are for patients and the wider prosperity of the nation. Supporting innovators through policy measures such as R&D tax credits and grant support is becoming a more important driver of economic growth.”
