Liverpool to gain global AI hub for health and social care

Quantexa, Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust and The University of Liverpool’s Civic Health Innovation Labs (CHIL) are teaming up to create a global AI hub for health and social care in Liverpool.

Quantexa’s Decision Intelligence Platform will be adopted by CHIL and Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust.

The company will be working alongside teams from the University of Liverpool, NHS Cheshire and Merseyside Integrated Care Board and Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust to harness AI-enabled decision intelligence tech. The collaboration will help to connect multiple data sources into a trusted data foundation that will continually equip researchers, care teams and patients to access, co-create and benefit from mental health research.

The Civic Health Innovation Lab (CHIL) and its partners will use a £4.9 million award from the Office for Life Sciences for a ‘Data-Action Accelerator’ project, a technology innovation engine for NHS Cheshire and Merseyside’s Data into Action Programme. This will allow them to make better, quicker decisions from NHS integrated care systems data, improving services for patients and communities.

Qantexa is soon to be co-located with CHIL, following the opening of its first UK regional delivery hub team in Q2 2024. The company is a core AI partner for the work being done by the Mental Health Research for Innovation Centre, a partnership between Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Liverpool to tackle global challenges in mental health.

Professor Joe Rafferty, chief executive of Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust, said:  “Our aim is to improve mental healthcare and treatments through advancing our understanding of how mental, physical and social conditions are interlinked and developing innovative research that brings together our service users with clinicians, academia and industry.

“Working with partners such as Quantexa, alongside our colleagues in the University of Liverpool, we can use data and AI to achieve better quality care for patients with mental health needs, and ultimately, better health outcomes and wellbeing for all.” 

Vishal Marria, CEO, Quantexa, said: “Quantexa’s vision is to work with university and NHS partners to address global current challenges in UK care programmes. Thanks to this OLS funding we can collaborate with M-RIC to improve care by making contextual data more accessible to providers and patients.

“Our investment into the northwest region to support Mersey Care, wider NHS partners and the University of Liverpool is an important step towards supporting clinicians, caregivers, and patients with the right information to achieve better patient outcomes.”

A scheme led by NHS Cheshire and Merseyside integrated care board, with technology partner C2-Ai, also focused on AI solutions. The NHS Waiting Well initiative uses artificial intelligence to identify patients on waiting lists who are at high risk of deterioration.