Our Purpose

The AI Health Society exists to support better outcomes and experiences for the people who receive and deliver healthcare, and a health system better able to meet their needs. We bring together people across healthcare, patient communities, research, policy, regulation and industry to understand their different definitions of value, evidence, risk and success. We help connect those perspectives and support responsible AI implementation, scaling and improvements across care pathways and at a population level.

Prof David Strain

Chair’s Introduction

“AI will transform healthcare more than any other sector or industry, and with it, the potential to improve productivity.”

When the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care made that statement on 25 March 2026, it captured both the scale of the opportunity before us and the responsibility that comes with it. Artificial intelligence has the potential to improve outcomes, release time for care, accelerate discovery and fundamentally rethink how healthcare is delivered. At a time of intense financial constraint, that matters. We must find ways to support better outcomes and experiences for the people who receive and deliver healthcare, while making responsible use of finite resources and funding and supporting the workforce. But transformation will not happen simply because the technology exists.

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That is why we have created the AI Health Society. Our purpose is not to champion technology for technology’s sake, nor simply to debate what AI might do. Our aim is to help turn possibility into practical progress towards better outcomes and experiences for patients and the workforce: creating a trusted multidisciplinary community in which evidence can be challenged, experience shared, confidence built, and the difficult questions of safety, governance, equity and value addressed openly. Different communities can mean different things by value, evidence, risk and success. By bringing these perspectives together, we can help people understand one another and make better-informed decisions about AI in healthcare. We want to bring together patients and carers, healthcare professionals, researchers, technologists, policymakers, regulators and industry to support practical education and shared learning, and help healthcare move beyond isolated pilots towards responsible implementation and scaling where evidence, local needs, infrastructure and readiness support it — considering effects across whole care pathways, services and populations, including patient experience, workforce impacts, equity, and where costs and benefits fall. Patient and patient need, rather than the technology itself, remains our starting point.

As Chair, I hope we will also look beyond using AI simply to do today’s healthcare faster or more cheaply. As economist Carl Benedikt Frey observed: “Had the 19th century focused solely on better looms and ploughs, we would enjoy cheap cloth and abundant grain — but there would be no antibiotics, jet engines or rockets. Economic miracles stem from discovery, not repeating tasks at greater speed.” The greatest contribution of AI may therefore not be automating what we already do, but enabling us to imagine what healthcare could become. My hope as Chair is that this community will help us explore how AI could support improvements across whole care pathways and new ways of the AI Health Society is to help turn that possibility into reality — improving care today while creating the space to discover what comes next.

Our Charter

The framework behind everything we do

The following 5 Key Pillars and guiding principles inform how we develop education, convene discussion, approach partnerships and support safe, effective and responsible implementation.

Technology is not the starting point. AI Health Society exists to support progress that keeps the needs, experience and outcomes of patients and the workforce central.

AI Health Society Charter showing five key pillars and six overarching principles

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Collaboration • Education • Implementation & Scaling • Governance • Evidence

Explore the Charter

The principles and pillars that guide our work

Explore the full AI Health Society Charter and the framework that underpins how the Society approaches healthcare AI.

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Independence & Governance

AI Health Society is committed to transparent, professionally managed and independent operation. The Society will maintain clear governance arrangements, manage conflicts of interest, and publish an accessible explanation of its structure, funding principles and commercial boundaries.