On My 7, 2025, researchers at the University College London (UCL) and King’s College London announced that an artificial intelligence (AI) model is being trained on a set of National Health Service (NHS) data for 57 million people in England, from which personal information has been stripped away, in a world-first pilot project.

The model could transform patient care, identifying opportunities where early interventions might significantly improve or save lives.

Foresight, a generative AI model, learns to predict what happens next based on previous medical events. It’s similar to models like ChatGPT, which predicts the next word in a sentence based on what it’s seen previously from data across the internet.

Foresight is being trained on routinely collected, de-identified NHS data, like hospital admissions and rates of Covid-19 vaccination, to predict potential health outcomes for patient groups across England. This could be events such as hospitalisation, heart attacks or a new diagnosis. Predicting these events early could enable targeted intervention, shifting towards more preventative healthcare at scale.

The pilot study operates entirely within the NHS England Secure Data Environment (SDE), a secure data and research analysis platform, that uniquely enables this work by providing controlled access to de-identified health data from the 57 million people living in England. Access to data at this scale is only made possible through the NHS England SDE, where both the AI model and all patient data remain under strict NHS control.

By including data covering England’s entire population, the model can make predictions about health outcomes across all demographics and for rare conditions. 

The researchers believe the model’s predictive power could pinpoint high-risk patient groups, opening up a window of opportunity to intervene to improve and save lives. Due to the diversity and completeness of the training data, the model could also help to highlight and address healthcare inequalities. And the ability to analyse healthcare risks and outcomes on a population level could offer critical support to the NHS when it comes to planning.