AI in primary care
Our team is collaborating with colleagues in Oxford’s Bioengineering department, WHO, the Health Foundation, and UNSW to explore how AI tools are reshaping primary care. We have authored a series of evidence reviews for The Lancet Primary Care and other journals, led international workshops, and are currently supporting WHO with AI- augmented qualitative evidence synthesis through AI-QUEST; our AI-augmented Qualitative Evidence Synthesis Team.
The Problem
Primary care confronts rising complexity, multimorbidity, administrative load, fragmentation etc yet the evidence base struggles to keep pace. AI, particularly large language models, offers promise to accelerate evidence synthesis, summarisation, and insight generation. But adoption in primary care is nascent. There are risks around bias, transparency, hallucinations, reproducibility, domain shift, and inadequate validation.
Approach
We are advancing AI-augmented evidence synthesis methods, especially for qualitative work via AI-QUEST. This includes protocol development, fine-tuning and calibration of LLMs for synthesising interview/focus group data, and embedding human oversight. We are piloting these methods on 200 country case studies of PHC policy reform. We are also documenting workflows, validating outputs with reference to manual thematic analysis approaches.
We are actively engaged in a range of other projects to explore how the use of AI tools is transforming models of primary care around the world, based on literature review and primary data collection.
Impact
We aim to deliver robust evidence on how AI can be used to promote safety, effectiveness, affordability, accessibility, and human flourishing. Our work on AI-augmented qualitative evidence synthesis aims to deliver efficient new tools for policymakers in low-resource settings who may not have access to real qualitative researchers.
Team members
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Amadea Turk
NIHR Doctoral Research Fellow
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Davide Bilardi
Teaching Fellow
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Gugulethu Moyo
Teaching Fellow
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Michael Kidd
Professor of Global Primary Care and Future Health Systems
