Dr Kieran Walsh, Clinical Director at BMJ Group, joined a PRSB panel discussion exploring how standards can support the safe and effective use of clinical AI across the NHS. The Q&A-based discussion focused on how clinical AI works with unstructured data, the role of standards in enabling structured and shareable information, and how the regulatory and compliance landscape for clinical AI is evolving.

A report of a recent roundtable discussion held at BMJ Future Health in London, explores how traditional clinical decision support, represented by BMJ Best Practice, compares with and complements the rapid rise of generative AI in healthcare. Chaired by Kieran Walsh, Clinical Director at BMJ, the discussion brought together three clinicians with frontline experience across hospital medicine, digital health, and decision support.

An informal comparison of BMJ Best Practice with leading generative AI models across common, high-stakes clinical scenarios found that BMJ Best Practice delivered far more reliable, evidence-based, and safety-focused guidance. While LLMs produced plausible answers, they lacked the depth, citations, and clinical nuance required for trustworthy decision support at the point of care.

There has been much discourse about the features and impact of clinical decision support. However, until recently, there has been less evidence on how healthcare professionals use decision support to provide evidence-based care or on the potential cost savings that could emerge from its use. A new study attempted to fill this gap by asking healthcare professionals how much they value digital clinical decision support to apply evidence-based care and save costs.

Climate change is no longer a concern for the future. It is a current reality with implications for patients, populations, and healthcare systems worldwide. BMJ Group is committed to playing its part in the field of climate change and healthcare, with a goal to achieve Net Zero throughout our operations by 2040. With BMJ Best Practice playing a large role in this, we are keen to explore how to make our content more sustainably minded.

The Independent Investigation of the National Health Service in England by Lord Darzi gives a comprehensive outline of the needs of the health service in England.4 The Darzi review touches on a wide range of topics – but certain issues stand out such as multimorbidity, mental health, and cancer care. This short briefing paper shows how BMJ Best Practice can help with these problems. It gives straightforward examples of how the knowledge within BMJ Best Practice can be put into practice to drive quality improvement.