Artificial Intelligence
Intended purpose
The CancerPath Assistant provides educational cancer-awareness information, explains CancerPath content and helps users navigate to relevant information, support and services. It does not provide a medical diagnosis.
What the AI can do
- Cancer education and awareness
- Screening education
- Navigation around CancerPath
- Support signposting
- Plain-English explanations of terminology
- Help preparing a neutral question list for a GP appointment
What the AI cannot do
- No diagnosis of cancer or any condition
- No individual cancer probability or risk score
- No replacement for professional healthcare advice
- No emergency service
- No prescribing or changes to medication
Knowledge sources
The assistant prioritises information from approved, trusted sources in this order:
- Clinically reviewed CancerPath content
- NHS
- NICE
- GOV.UK / UKHSA
- Cancer Research UK
- Macmillan Cancer Support
- Peer-reviewed research approved for the CancerPath Research Hub
The assistant will not use random health blogs or unverified commercial health websites as evidence, and it never invents citations.
Privacy
Conversations may contain sensitive health information. Chat history is not saved automatically — the user chooses whether to save a conversation to their private My CancerPath area. Saving defaults to off. Users can view, delete individual conversations, delete all conversations, and download their information at any time. Conversations are not used to train future AI models unless CancerPath establishes an appropriate lawful basis and a separate explicit consent process.
Human oversight
Reported responses and safety concerns are made available to authorised CancerPath administrators for review. Administrators can flag or remove incorrect content and update approved sources. The assistant is supervised as part of CancerPath's clinical-safety and governance processes.
AI limitations
AI-generated information may occasionally be incomplete or incorrect. Important health decisions should always be discussed with an appropriate healthcare professional. CancerPath does not claim regulatory approval for the assistant unless formally confirmed.
Safety controls
The assistant has a deterministic emergency-safety layer that interrupts the conversation when a message may indicate a life-threatening emergency, directing users to call 999 or get urgent NHS help. It is bound to clinical boundaries that prevent diagnosis, individual risk calculation, and medication advice. Administrators can disable the assistant immediately via a kill switch without affecting the rest of CancerPath.