Samit Kumar Biswas, CEO and founder of Care Safe, outlines the role AI has to play in driving improved care outcomes.
Artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled health and social care is often viewed through the lenses of technological innovation, disruptive efficiency, and market change. However, for the millions of individuals who navigate the complexities of care, its real importance lies in basic human goals: ensuring personal safety, fostering a sense of recognition and worth, and ultimately enabling them to live independently with dignity.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Access deeper industry intelligence
Experience unmatched clarity with a single platform that combines unique data, AI, and human expertise.
The current health and social care systems, unfortunately, fall short for a significant part of the population – vulnerable adults, people with disabilities, and an increasing number of older individuals. The widespread issues of long waiting times for GP appointments, severely overstretched community health teams, and chronically limited social care capacity mean many individuals are effectively slipping through the cracks. Their situations often worsen unaddressed until a crisis point is reached, inevitably leading to an urgent and costly admission to A&E or hospital. This reactive cycle causes serious harm not only to individuals and their families but also imposes an unsustainable burden on national health services such as the UK National Health Service (NHS).
However, there is a powerful alternative. When used ethically, intelligently, and with a human-centric design philosophy, Artificial Intelligence – especially through the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and advanced AI-driven safeguarding technologies – has the transformative potential to fundamentally change this narrative.
Accessibility and affordability: the promise of ethical LLMs
To realise this potential, it is essential to understand what an LLM signifies in the context of care. Imagine a highly advanced AI digital assistant that has carefully processed and learned from an extensive digital library consisting of millions of medical textbooks, comprehensive care guides, and countless hours of health-related conversations. An LLM has the remarkable ability to understand nuanced questions, synthesise vast amounts of data, and explain complex medical and care topics using clear, straightforward language – much like a highly empathetic and knowledgeable human expert.
How this transforms health and social care
An LLM could act as an “always-on” companion, carefully designed to ease these pressures and significantly enhance the experience of care.
Instant Guidance and Clarity
For example, an adult child caring for an elderly parent could inquire about medication interactions, dietary advice for a chronic condition, or suitable exercises for mobility, and receive immediate, safe, and easily comprehensible guidance tailored to their query.
Improved access and preparation
An LLM can empower patients to articulate their symptoms and concerns more clearly and precisely before a medical consultation. This enables a more focused diagnosis and treatment during the appointment, leading to more efficient and effective clinical encounters.
More personalised care delivery
By intelligently managing and automating routine administrative tasks and responding to frequently asked questions, LLMs can considerably free up the valuable time of doctors, nurses, and carers. This enables human care professionals to focus more on direct, empathetic patient interactions, thereby making care delivery truly more personalised, less hurried, and deeply human.
An ethically governed LLM can become an essential translator, advocate, and guide between individuals and the often-impersonal healthcare system. Available seamlessly 24/7 and capable of communicating in plain language across multiple languages, an AI assistant can help in areas including the explaining of complex discharge letters, intricate care plans and detailed medication instructions in an accessible and understandable format.
AI assistants can also signpost critical local services, eligible benefits and connect it with vital social support networks, provide step-by-step guidance to carers on essential tasks such as safe patient moving techniques or optimal nutrition plans, and educate, triage, and prompt, but the final decisions on diagnosis, treatment, and safeguarding must, without exception, remain with qualified human professionals. This requirement means that LLMs must be carefully trained and fine-tuned on verified clinical guidance, thoroughly audited for biases, and used only within strict governance frameworks.
If implemented correctly and conscientiously, this technology will significantly improve the system’s overall efficiency and greatly enhance its accessibility. The ability to receive understandable first-line support within minutes can be life-changing and cost-effective for the healthcare system.
Digital safeguarding and globally connected monitoring
Beyond immediate advice, technology provides the potential for digital safeguarding and remote medical monitoring.
Consider a globally connected smartwatch seamlessly linked to an advanced digital safeguarding platform. This system can continuously monitor subtle patterns and deviations such as changes in daily routines, disruptions to sleep patterns, alterations in mobility or unusual times spent away from home. These nuanced changes are often the earliest and most critical warning signs of impending deterioration or an emerging crisis.
In the UK, hospitals are often filled with medically fit individuals unable to be discharged due to the critical lack of a safe, supported, and adequately monitored environment at home.
A comprehensive digital safeguarding and remote monitoring solution directly tackles this issue by enabling clinicians and families to confidently agree to earlier discharges based on compelling evidence and continuous oversight.
Home-based care: a public health imperative
The underlying societal patterns are stark and undeniable: rapidly ageing populations, a growing prevalence of chronic illnesses, persistent and worsening healthcare workforce shortages and an inexorably rising demand for hospital-based care. The only truly scalable, sustainable, and compassionate solution is to proactively support individuals earlier, closer to their homes, and in a more intelligent, integrated way.
In the UK, specific demographics continue to face disproportionate barriers to accessing basic primary and social care. While AI-enabled home support is not a cure-all for all complex issues, it remains one of the few tools capable of quickly and effectively overcoming widespread geographical and infrastructural barriers.
NHS care and other publicly funded health systems are not “free”. They are carefully financed through collective taxation. Therefore, every unnecessary hospital admission, each entirely preventable health crisis, and every missed opportunity for early intervention add up to a tangible and avoidable cost to us all.
We must also be completely honest with ourselves: our health is primarily our own responsibility. Technology, no matter how advanced, cannot force us to walk more, drink enough water, get sufficient sleep or manage our diets properly. The more wisely we use AI and digital tools to actively oversee our health and work together within our communities, the less unavoidable pressure we place on our inherently limited and often overstretched public health systems.
Jobs, dignity and a stronger local economy
Another highly positive aspect of AI-enabled care, often overlooked, is its substantial potential to generate decent, meaningful, and local jobs – crucially, in the communities where people live.
The rise of remote monitoring centres, the expansion of community-based care teams, the local provision of phlebotomy services, the demand for home health aides, and the operation of specialist transport all create employment opportunities directly in areas that often see young people leaving in search of work.
If we can effectively articulate and demonstrate that AI in health and social care genuinely reduces crises, demonstrably improves patient outcomes, and actively creates high-quality local employment opportunities, we will be in a stronger position to advocate for sustained long-term investment in new technologies and comprehensive training programmes.
A call to action: our health, our responsibility, our chance
Let us be clear: AI will not “save” us. People will. However, when deployed ethically, sustainably, and with a steadfast focus on inclusion, AI can offer unprecedented tools to deeply improve how we care for one another. It has the potential to deliver essential primary health and social care directly to those who currently cannot access it. It can strongly support independence for people with disabilities, enable safe and dignified ageing in place, and significantly ease the immense and unsustainable pressure on our hospitals and public health systems.
Our health is both a personal responsibility and a collective opportunity. With AI strategically positioned as a powerful facilitator, we have the unprecedented chance to create a future where safety, accessibility, and dignified independence in health and social care are not just aspirational ideals but tangible realities accessible to all, regardless of their location or circumstances.
