Health Education England (HEE) is aiming to make use of machine learning technology in the management of medical trainees and workforce planning.
It has begun to look for a partner in a discovery and alpha project, to understand how to use the tech in relevant analysis and prediction.
This comes in response to workforce challenges identified in the NHS Long Term Plan, which highlights that the growth in staff numbers has not kept up with increasing demand on the health service. It also reflects a closer alignment between HEE and NHS Improvement, which now has the lead responsibility for the workforce.
HEE is aiming to complete the initial project by next April, but has already identified some potential use cases. These include classifying groups with high retention risk, identifying the factors that cause people to leave the health service, predicting outcomes in the Annual Review of Competency to spot the trainees in difficulty, and developing models to improve the rotation schedule of trainees.
To support these it is looking to improve its current predictive analytics, bringing together datasets on trainees, the wider workforce and learning, along with social, economic and environmental data.
The organisation has published a procurement notice indicating that the discovery and alpha is valued at around £50,000.
The Long Term Plan also highlighted the need to use machine learning in patient safety, learning from incident data and developing a better system of alerts.
Image from Mike MacKenzie, CC BY 2.0
