Corporate document

Overview

Overview

NICE helps the NHS and wider health and care system deliver the best care to people, fast, while ensuring value for the taxpayer. We do this by developing guidance, advice and information through a diverse range of programmes, that share the same core process of identification, assessment and interpretation of evidence.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) methods, from relatively well-established machine learning approaches to newer and more complex generative AI, offers several potential benefits for this process.

AI methods can efficiently process and analyse large datasets to reveal patterns and relationships that may not be readily apparent to human analysts. And increasingly, generative AI can create novel outputs based upon what it learns from data.

Such capabilities may offer superior approaches to evidence generation for health technologies. It's highly likely that, in the near future, evidence considered by NICE will be informed by AI methods.

However, concerns about the appropriateness, transparency and trustworthiness of AI do exist. It's important to consider the use of AI methods carefully to ensure the anticipated benefits are balanced against the known concerns. This means guidance is needed on how to present evidence that has been informed by AI methods. Any consideration of AI methods should support our commitment to better meeting the needs of our users by creating guidance that is more relevant, timely, useable and impactful.

This position statement sets out our view on the use of AI methods in the generation and reporting of evidence considered by its evaluation programmes. It aims to:

  • outline what NICE expects when AI methods are considered or used for evidence generation and reporting

  • indicate existing regulations, good practices, standards and guidelines to follow when using AI methods, where appropriate

  • support our committee members and external assessment groups to understand and critique the potential uses of AI methods.

This statement relates to the potential use of AI in the generation and reporting of evidence considered by NICE. It does not consider the evaluation of health technologies that use AI methods to perform their function (AI-enabled technologies).

We have not included a detailed description of methodological aspects, process considerations and NICE's methods research relating to AI, because future papers will cover these in detail.