Nomathamsanqa Tshuma

Fellowship Bio

Noma is a haematology registrar in London focused on health data and AI in healthcare. She completed a Digital Innovation Fellowship at UCLH, focused on real-world evidence for patient care. She is also the Data Lead for HaemSTAR and has started a PhD in Transfusion Genomics at Cambridge.

Fellowship Project

Blood cancers include over 100 different types and diagnosing them correctly requires doctors to carefully combine results from several different tests — blood counts, bone marrow samples and genetic tests — against detailed guidelines. This process takes a lot of time and expertise, even in major hospitals. ENABLE-AI is a computer tool that helps by automatically reading these test reports and drafting a combined summary, showing which guideline criteria are met and why. A specialist doctor then checks, edits if needed, and approves every report before it is used in a patient’s care. The tool runs on secure, local computers, so patient information never leaves the hospital. Our goal is to save doctors’ time and reduce delays in diagnosis, while keeping doctors fully in control of every decision made. My contribution: I conducted the patient survey, which gathered patients’ views on having an AI tool integrated into their diagnostic pathway, including their concerns and expectations around trust and safety. I helped design the tool and how it will fit within our clinical workflow. I worked on establishing relationships with key stakeholders across the project and kept them up to date with progress throughout. I also helped design the synthetic data cases used to test the model’s performance and have contributed to the ongoing risk analysis of the tool. Project milestones: We have completed the patient survey and presented our results. The platform has been built with patient views taken into consideration and has been tested against a synthetic dataset covering a range of diagnoses. We are now moving into the next phase, testing the tool on real, anonymised patient cases, with the results expected to inform further refinement of the tool ahead of clinical deployment.

Fellowship Testimonial

I have thoroughly enjoyed the fellowship and would highly recommend it for the exposure it gives to AI companies and individuals working on AI in healthcare, both within the NHS and the private sector. It has broadened my perspective on what is possible when clinical expertise and technical development are brought together and has genuinely shaped how I think about my own career going forward.

• I really enjoyed the workshops — they were always so engaging and educational, bringing together a great mix of clinical and technical speakers, and they are what I will miss the most.
• I gained valuable hands-on experience in delivering digital transformation within a clinical setting, including navigating stakeholder engagement, project planning, and change management across a multidisciplinary team.
• I improved my coding skills significantly, building confidence I did not have before starting the fellowship, and can now contribute meaningfully to technical discussions with developers and data scientists.
• I improved my understanding of health data governance and its practical implications for the safe and ethical deployment of AI tools within the NHS, particularly around consent, data sovereignty, and information security.
• I feel I have grown my professional network significantly and have become part of a community I can reach out to for help and advice and can equally confidently answer when others reach out to me.
• I will be pursuing a career in health tech. My interest lies in precision medicine, and this experience has shown me how AI tools can be used to achieve this. I will be integrating these lessons into my PhD and carrying them forward into my future clinical and research work, wherever that path leads next.