Allied health professionals must be proactive and ‘seek out’ AI

Allied health professionals (AHPs) should not wait for AI to come to them, write physiotherapists Christopher Efford and Charlie Winward

AI is everywhere. If you’re not using it, you’re probably considering it. It’s the big trend in healthcare innovation and (according to AI) the solution to just about everything.

AI solutions are rapidly developing in healthcare diagnostics, drug discovery, risk stratification, clinical monitoring, and clinical note-taking or ambient voice scribes. With so many AI technologies entering healthcare, it can be a difficult to know where to start.

As a clinician, it is essential to understand the language, lifecycle and clinical implications of AI to ensure its safe and effective deployment in clinical settings.

It’s imperative that education and training on clinical AI is made more widely available for the AHP workforce. Without this, we risk lagging behind our medical colleagues in harnessing its benefits.

The Society of Radiographers has developed AI guidance and the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy has released its AI principles document. However, there is a growing need for unified AHP professional guidance on AI in healthcare to address AI and digital skills development, AI safety and adoption, and AI data readiness for the clinical workplace.

How to be expert in clinical AI

To develop expertise in clinical AI can be challenging, particularly if you are seeking AHP-specific programmes.

The NHS England Fellowship in Clinical AI is a comprehensive 12-month programme that covers AI fundamentals, including integration and systems impact, strategy and culture, and the deployment of immersive AI projects for healthcare professionals.

In 2024 nurses, midwives, AHPs, and clinical scientists were considered for the fellowship for the first time. We graduated last month, on 23 June 2025.  We are the first physiotherapists to be appointed to the fellowship.

Our motivation in applying for the fellowship was a desire to be at the forefront of digital clinical care. We wanted to learn how to identify and deploy clinical AI technologies which support both our patients and our clinicians.

We also wanted to understand how to judge the efficacy of AI algorithms and safely deploy these technologies with information governance and cyber security in mind.

You can read about the cohort projects here.

There has been a huge amount of learning on this fellowship, and while that may not be for everyone there are key principles which we feel are important for the UK AHP workforce.

• Data is king

Successful clinical AI deployment hinges on the availability of high-quality clinical data. Poor data quality will impact the effectiveness of AI solutions.

AHP services often face several challenges transitioning to digital systems and routinely collecting digital data. Even when data is collected electronically, much of it remains unstructured and difficult to interpret.

It is imperative that we focus on improving our data collection methods and structuring our data to facilitate the potential of AI.

• Be proactive

To harness the advantages of AI in AHP workstreams, we must be leading the work or someone else will do this for us and potentially direct what we do.

Our professionals must be supported to adopt digital strategy or culture and increase their digital health and clinical AI knowledge and experience.

We should be participating in digital courses and Fellowship programmes, advocating for Higher Education Institutions to create Masters level education frameworks for digital health and clinical AI, and continuing to train clinicians in change management and leadership. All of this will help to spearhead digital AHPs.

• Re-design pathways

Identifying opportunities for AI integration within clinical pathways requires significant expertise. Implementing an AI solution in a pathway that contains bottlenecks or inefficiencies is unlikely to yield the anticipated results or deliver the proposed benefits.

If we design digital clinical workflows with AI vendors, stakeholders and patient and public involvement, rather than attempt to incorporate AI into existing ‘analogue’ processes, it  will lead to better outcomes.

• Digital clinical safety requires leadership

The safe deployment of any digital health technology necessitates thorough due diligence and digital clinical safety measures. Clinical AI is no exception.

This work requires clinicians trained as clinical safety officers, as well as chief clinical information officers and chief nursing information officers. The rapid growth in AI solution deployments means it is increasingly important to develop AHPs as digital health leaders.

Enhancing patient care

AI’s potential to enhance patient care and save clinicians’ time by analysing large therapy datasets, could lead to improvements in treatment plans and patient recovery times. Practical AI tools like ambient voice scribes and patient triage systems can expedite patient care leading to reductions in waiting lists.

AI is not just a tool for radiologists, it has profound implications for physiotherapists and other AHPs

Remote monitoring or ‘wearables’ and associated data assimilation could predict physiotherapy needs in long term conditions which is crucial for understaffed services.

AHPs must now explore AI’s transformative options and actively seek opportunities rather than waiting for AI solutions to come to us.

Through this fellowship, we have come to understand the immense potential of AI in transforming clinical care pathways for AHPs. We have learned that AI is not just a tool for radiologists; it has profound implications for physiotherapists and other AHPs.

By being proactive in embracing AI, we can revolutionise patient care, making it more efficient and effective.

Our journey has emphasised the importance of collecting and maintaining high-quality data, the need for developing expertise in digital health, and the significance of designing pathways to fully integrate AI solutions.

The future of healthcare lies in the hands of those who are willing to lead the charge in digital transformation.

Christopher Efford is MSK therapy lead at University Hospitals Dorset NHS Foundation Trust.

Charlie Winward is a physiotherapist working in the NHS.