̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - productivity

Opinion: AI can unlock productivity in public services

lw355 — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 07:00:19 +0000

AI applications have tremendous potential for improving productivity – saving time and money and improving quality of service. Here's what's required to make this work in the public sector, says Diane Coyle.

Having a ‘regular doctor’ can significantly reduce GP workload, study finds

sc604 — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 01:11:40 +0000

In one of the largest studies of its kind, researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and INSEAD analysed data from more than 10 million consultations in 381 English primary care practices over a period of 11 years.

̽��ֱ��results, reported in the journal Management Science, suggest that a long-term relationship between a patient and their doctor could both improve patient health and reduce workload for GPs.

̽��ֱ��researchers found that when patients were able to see their regular doctor for a consultation – a model known as continuity of care – they waited on average 18% longer between visits, compared to patients who saw a different doctor. ̽��ֱ��productivity benefit of continuity of care was larger for older patients, those with multiple chronic conditions, and individuals with mental health conditions.

Although it will not always be possible for a patient to see their regular GP, this productivity differential would translate to an estimated 5% reduction in consultations if all practices in England were providing the level of care continuity of the best 10% of practices.

Primary care in the UK is under enormous strain: patients struggle to get appointments, GPs are retiring early, and financial pressures are causing some practices to close. According to the Health Foundation and the Nuffield Trust, there is a significant shortfall of GPs in England, with a projected 15% increase required in the workforce. ̽��ֱ��problem is not limited to UK, however: the Association of American Medical Colleges estimates a shortfall of between 21,400 and 55,200 primary care physicians in the US by 2033.

“Productivity is a huge problem across all the whole of the UK – we wanted to see how that’s been playing out in GP practices,” said Dr Harshita Kajaria-Montag, the study’s lead author, who is now based at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana ̽��ֱ��. “Does the rapid access model make GPs more productive?”

“You can measure the productivity of GP surgeries in two ways: how many patients can you see in a day, or how much health can you provide in a day for those patients,” said co-author Professor Stefan Scholtes from Cambridge Judge Business School. “Some GP surgeries are industrialised in their approach: each patient will get seven or ten minutes before the GP has to move on to the next one.”

At English GP practices, roughly half of all appointments are with a patient’s regular doctor, but this number has been steadily declining over the past decade as GP practices come under increasing strain.

̽��ֱ��researchers used an anonymised dataset from the UK Clinical Practice Research Datalink, consisting of more than 10 million GP visits between 1 January 2007 and 31 December 2017. Using statistical models to account for confounding and selection bias, and restricting the sample to consultations with patients who had at least three consultations over the past two years, the researchers found that the time to a patient’s next visit is substantially longer when the patient sees the doctor they have seen most frequently over the past two years, while there is no operationally meaningful difference in consultation duration.

“ ̽��ֱ��impact is substantial: it could be the equivalent of increasing the GP workforce by five percent, which would significantly benefit both patients and the NHS,” said Scholtes. “Better health translates into less demand for future consultations. Prioritising continuity of care is crucial in enhancing productivity.”

“ ̽��ֱ��benefits of continuity of care are obvious from a relationship point of view,” said Kajaria-Montag. “If you’re a patient with complex health needs, you don’t want to have to explain your whole health history at every appointment. If you have a regular doctor who’s familiar with your history, it’s a far more efficient use of time, for doctor and patient.”

“A regular doctor may have a larger incentive to take more time to treat her regular patients thoroughly than a transactional provider,” said Scholtes. “Getting it right the first time will reduce her future workload by preventing revisits, which would likely be her responsibility, while a transactional provider is less likely to see the patient for her next visit.”

̽��ֱ��researchers emphasise that continuity of care does not only have the known benefits of better patient outcomes, better patient and GP experience, and reduced secondary care use, but also provides a surprisingly large productivity benefit for the GP practices themselves.

Reference:
Harshita Kajaria-Montag, Michael Freeman, Stefan Scholtes. ‘Continuity of Care Increases Physician Productivity in Primary Care.’ Management Science (2024). DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2021.02015

If all GP practices moved to a model where patients saw the same doctor at each visit, it could significantly reduce doctor workload while improving patient health, a study suggests.

̽��ֱ��Good Brigade via Getty Images

Doctor examining a patient

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

UK needs AI legislation to create trust so companies can ‘plug AI into British economy’

fpjl2 — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 06:20:05 +0000

̽��ֱ��British government should offer tax breaks for businesses developing AI-powered products and services, or applying AI to their existing operations, to 'unlock the UK’s potential for augmented productivity', according to a new ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge report.

Researchers argue that the UK currently lacks the computing capacity and capital required to build 'generative' machine learning models fast enough to compete with US companies such as Google, Microsoft or Open AI.

Instead, they call for a UK focus on leveraging these new AI systems for real-world applications – such as developing new diagnostic products and addressing the shortage of software engineers – which could provide a major boost to the British economy.

However, the researchers caution that without new legislation to ensure the UK has solid legal and ethical AI regulation, such plans could falter. British industries and the public may struggle to trust emerging AI platforms such as ChatGPT enough to invest time and money into skilling up.

̽��ֱ��policy report is a collaboration between Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, Bennett Institute for Public Policy, and ai@cam: the ̽��ֱ��’s flagship initiative on artificial intelligence.

“Generative AI will change the nature of how things are produced, just as what occurred with factory assembly lines in the 1910s or globalised supply chains at the turn of the millennium,” said Dame Diane Coyle, Bennett Professor of Public Policy. “ ̽��ֱ��UK can become a global leader in actually plugging these AI technologies into the economy.”

Prof Gina Neff, Executive Director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, said: “A new Bill that fosters confidence in AI by legislating for data protection, intellectual property and product safety is vital groundwork for using this technology to increase UK productivity.”

Generative AI uses algorithms trained on giant datasets to output original high-quality text, images, audio, or video at ferocious speed and scale. ̽��ֱ��text-based ChatGPT dominated headlines this year. Other examples include Midjourney, which can conjure imagery in any different style in seconds.

Networked grids – or clusters – of computing hardware called Graphics Processing Units (GPU) are required to handle the vast quantities of data that hone these machine-learning models. For example, ChatGPT is estimated to cost $40 million a month in computing alone. In the spring of this year, the UK chancellor announced £100 million for a “Frontier AI Taskforce” to scope out the creation of home-grown AI to rival the likes of Google Bard.

However, the report points out that the supercomputer announced by the UK chancellor is unlikely to be online until 2026, while none of the big three US tech companies – Amazon, Microsoft or Google – have GPU clusters in the UK.

“ ̽��ֱ��UK has no companies big enough to invest meaningfully in foundation model development,” said report co-author Sam Gilbert. “State spending on technology is modest compared to China and the US, as we have seen in the UK chip industry.”

As such, the UK should use its strengths in fin-tech, cybersecurity and health-tech to build software – the apps, tools and interfaces – that harnesses AI for everyday use, says the report.

“Generative AI has been shown to speed up coding by some 55%, which could help with the UK’s chronic developer shortage,” said Gilbert. “In fact, this type of AI can even help non-programmers to build sophisticated software.”

Moreover, the UK has world-class research universities that could drive progress in tackling AI stumbling blocks: from the cooling of data centres to the detection of AI-generated misinformation.

At the moment, however, UK organisations lack incentives to comply with responsible AI. “ ̽��ֱ��UK’s current approach to regulating generative AI is based on a set of vague and voluntary principles that nod at security and transparency,” said report co-author Dr Ann Kristin Glenster.

“ ̽��ֱ��UK will only be able to realise the economic benefits of AI if the technology can be trusted, and that can only be ensured through meaningful legislation and regulation.”

Along with new AI laws, the report suggests a series of tax incentives, such as an enhanced Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme, to increase the supply of capital to AI start-ups, as well as tax credits for all businesses including generative AI in their operations. Challenge prizes could be launched to identify bottom-up uses of generative AI from within organisations.

Legislating for AI safety and transparency will allow British industry and education to put resources into AI development with confidence, argue researchers.

̽��ֱ��UK can become a global leader in actually plugging these AI technologies into the economy

Diane Coyle

Getty/BlackJack3D

Data Tunnel

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Robots cause company profits to fall – at least at first

sc604 — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 10:05:12 +0000

̽��ֱ��researchers, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, studied industry data from the UK and 24 other European countries between 1995 and 2017, and found that at low levels of adoption, robots have a negative effect on profit margins. But at higher levels of adoption, robots can help increase profits.

According to the researchers, this U-shaped phenomenon is due to the relationship between reducing costs, developing new processes and innovating new products. While many companies first adopt robotic technologies to decrease costs, this ‘process innovation’ can be easily copied by competitors, so at low levels of robot adoption, companies are focused on their competitors rather than on developing new products. However, as levels of adoption increase and robots are fully integrated into a company’s processes, the technologies can be used to increase revenue by innovating new products.

In other words, firms using robots are likely to focus initially on streamlining their processes before shifting their emphasis to product innovation, which gives them greater market power via the ability to differentiate from their competitors. ̽��ֱ��results are reported in the journal IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management.

Robots have been widely used in industry since the 1980s, especially in sectors where they can carry out physically demanding, repetitive tasks, such as automotive assembly. In the decades since, the rate of robot adoption has increased dramatically and consistently worldwide, and the development of precise, electrically controlled robots makes them particularly useful for high-value manufacturing applications requiring greater precision, such as electronics.

While robots have been shown to reliably raise labour productivity at an industry or country level, what has been less studied is how robots affect profit margins at a similar macro scale.

“If you look at how the introduction of computers affected productivity, you actually see a slowdown in productivity growth in the 1970s and early 1980s, before productivity starts to rise again, which it did until the financial crisis of 2008,” said co-author Professor Chander Velu from Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing. “It’s interesting that a tool meant to increase productivity had the opposite effect, at least at first. We wanted to know whether there is a similar pattern with robotics.”

“We wanted to know whether companies were using robots to improve processes within the firm, rather than improve the whole business model,” said co-author Dr Philip Chen. “Profit margin can be a useful way to analyse this.”

̽��ֱ��researchers examined industry-level data for 25 EU countries (including the UK, which was a member at the time) between 1995 and 2017. While the data did not drill down to the level of individual companies, the researchers were able to look at whole sectors, primarily in manufacturing where robots are commonly used.

̽��ֱ��researchers then obtained robotics data from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) database. By comparing the two sets of data, they were able to analyse the effect of robotics on profit margins at a country level.

“Intuitively, we thought that more robotic technologies would lead to higher profit margins, but the fact that we see this U-shaped curve instead was surprising,” said Chen.

“Initially, firms are adopting robots to create a competitive advantage by lowering costs,” said Velu. “But process innovation is cheap to copy, and competitors will also adopt robots if it helps them make their products more cheaply. This then starts to squeeze margins and reduce profit margin.”

̽��ֱ��researchers then carried out a series of interviews with an American medical equipment manufacturer to study their experiences with robot adoption.

“We found that it’s not easy to adopt robotics into a business – it costs a lot of money to streamline and automate processes,” said Chen.

“When you start bringing more and more robots into your process, eventually you reach a point where your whole process needs to be redesigned from the bottom up,” said Velu. “It’s important that companies develop new processes at the same time as they’re incorporating robots, otherwise they will reach this same pinch point.”

̽��ֱ��researchers say that if companies want to reach the profitable side of the U-shaped curve more quickly, it’s important that the business model is adapted concurrently with robot adoption. Only after robots are fully integrated into the business model can companies fully use the power of robotics to develop new products, driving profits.

A related piece of work being led by the Institute for Manufacturing is a community programme to help small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEEs) to adopt digital technologies including robotics in a low-cost, low-risk way. “Incremental and step changes in this area enable SMEs to get the benefits of cost reduction as well as margin improvements from new products,” said co-author Professor Duncan McFarlane.

̽��ֱ��research was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), which are both part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Chander Velu is a Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge. Duncan McFarlane is a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge.

Reference:
Yifeng P Chen, Chander Velu, Duncan McFarlane. ‘ ̽��ֱ��Effect of Robot Adoption on Profit Margins.’ IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management (2023). DOI: 10.1109/TEM.2023.3260734

Researchers have found that robots can have a ‘U-shaped’ effect on profits: causing profit margins to fall at first, before eventually rising again.

It’s important that companies develop new processes at the same time as they’re incorporating robots, otherwise they will reach this same pinch point

Chander Velu

kynny via Getty Images

Robots on a manufacturing line

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

‘Smart’ drugs can decrease productivity in people who don’t have ADHD, study finds

fpjl2 — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 15:58:04 +0000

New research from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and the ̽��ֱ�� of Melbourne, published in Science Advances, shows neurotypical workers and students taking cognitive enhancers, or ‘smart’ drugs, may actually be inhibiting their performance and productivity.

Drugs such as methylphenidate, sold under the brand name Ritalin among others, are commonly prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but are also taken by those without a diagnosis, in the belief that the drugs will enhance focus and cognitive performance.

In four double-blinded, randomised trials in Melbourne, each a week apart, the same 40 healthy participants took one of three popular ‘smart’ drugs (methylphenidate, modafinil or dextroamphetamine) or a placebo. They were assessed on how they performed in a test designed to model the complex decision-making and problem-solving present in our everyday lives.

While previous studies into the effects of smart drugs have used simpler cognitive tasks targeting memory or attention, the Melbourne trial involved more computationally complex activities that better simulate the difficult nature of tasks people encounter in daily life.

Participants were asked to complete an exercise known as the Knapsack Optimisation Problem – or ‘knapsack task’ – in which they were given a virtual knapsack with a set capacity, and a selection of items of different weights and values. ̽��ֱ��participants had to figure out how to best allocate items to the bag, to maximise the overall value of its contents.

Overall, participants taking the drugs saw small decreases in accuracy and efficiency, along with large increases in time and effort, relative to their results when not taking the drugs.

For example, when given methylphenidate – often used to treat ADHD in children, but increasingly taken by college students cramming for exams – participants took around 50% longer on average to complete the knapsack problem as when they were given a placebo.

In addition, participants who performed at a higher level in the placebo condition compared to the rest of the group tended to show a bigger decrease in performance and productivity after receiving a drug.

In terms of 'productivity', for example – the level of progress per item moved in or out of the knapsack – the participants in the top 25% under a placebo regularly ended up in the bottom 25% under methylphenidate.

By contrast, participants who had a lower performance in a placebo condition only very occasionally exhibited a slight improvement after taking a drug.

Professor Peter Bossaerts, Leverhulme International Professor of Neuroeonomics at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, believes more research needs to be conducted to find out what effects the drugs are having on users without ADHD.

“Our results suggest that these drugs don’t actually make you ‘smarter’,” said Bossaerts. “Because of the dopamine the drugs induce, we expected to see increased motivation, and they do motivate one to try harder. However, we discovered that this exertion caused more erratic thinking — in ways that we could make precise because the knapsack task had been widely studied in computer science.

“Performance did not generally increase, so questions remain about how the drugs are affecting people’s minds and their decision making.”

Dr Elizabeth Bowman researcher at the Centre for Brain, Mind and Markets at the ̽��ֱ�� of Melbourne and lead author of the study said the results show we have yet to establish the effectiveness of pharmaceutical enhancers on our performance, when used by neurotypical people to perform everyday complex tasks.

“Our research shows drugs that are expected to improve cognitive performance in patients may actually be leading to healthy users working harder while producing a lower quality of work in a longer amount of time,” said Bowman.

Smart drugs do motivate people, but the added effort can lead to “erratic thinking”, adversely affecting above-average performers, according to researchers.

Our results suggest that these drugs don’t actually make you ‘smarter’

Peter Bossaerts

Getty images

Drug graphic

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Digital manufacturing on a shoestring

lw355 — Thu, 24 Feb 2022 08:30:57 +0000

How approaches to low-cost digitalisation pioneered by Cambridge researchers are helping smaller UK manufacturers to go digital and reap the rewards of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Beyond the pandemic: focus on productivity to make everyone better off

lw355 — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 08:10:17 +0000

There is no way out of the immediate economic hit of a pandemic, says Professor Diane Coyle, but to heal social fractures, we must focus on giving people across the whole of the country access to the opportunities they need.

Cambridge takes major role in initiative to help solve UK ‘productivity puzzle’

fpjl2 — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 05:37:06 +0000

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge is one of the partners in a major new £32.4m Productivity Institute, announced today by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. It is the largest economic and social research investment ever in the UK.

Productivity – the way ideas and labour are transformed into products and services that benefit society – has been lacklustre in the UK over recent decades, with limited growth stalled further by the global financial crisis of 2008-9 and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

To address the urgent challenge, the new Institute will bring together institutions and researchers from across the country to tackle questions of job creation, sustainability and wellbeing, as the UK looks to a post-pandemic future full of technological and environmental upheaval.

Professor Diane Coyle, co-director of the ̽��ֱ��’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy will be one of the new Institute’s Directors and leading one of its eight major research themes. She will be heading up the strand on Knowledge Capital: the ideas that drive productivity and progress.

Professor Anna Vignoles from Cambridge’s Faculty of Education will helm another of the main research strands, on Human Capital: the cultivation of people’s skills and abilities. Both lead academics will be supported by a host of other Cambridge researchers from a variety of departments, including POLIS, Psychology, Economics, and the Institute for Manufacturing.

̽��ֱ��Productivity Institute will be headquartered at the ̽��ֱ�� of Manchester, and, along with Cambridge, other members of the leading consortium include the National Institute of Economic and Social Research and the universities of Glasgow, Sheffield, Cardiff and Warwick. ̽��ֱ��new Institute is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (part of UK Research and Innovation).

“Productivity is economic jargon for something fundamentally important,” said Professor Coyle. “This is the question of what will enable people’s lives everywhere to improve sustainably over time, ensuring new technologies, along with business and policy choices, bring widespread benefits.”

“Productivity is key to the creation of decent work and the provision of high quality education and healthcare. Its growth offers people sustainable improvements in their standard of living,” she said.

̽��ֱ��Knowledge Capital theme, led by Coyle, will investigate the way that ideas and know-how – “intangible assets” not easily defined or measured – permeate our society and the economy.

“We want to understand better the links between productivity and things that are important but hard to pin down, whether that’s how businesses adopt new technologies and ideas or the role of social networks in determining how well different areas perform,” said Coyle.

Professor Vignoles will lead a team considering the importance of individuals’ wellbeing and productivity, which will include Cambridge psychologist Dr Simone Schnall. It remains an open question as to whether greater wellbeing can increase the productivity of individuals, and what the implications of this might be for both national policy and firms’ strategies.

“Increasing productivity is a pressing priority for the UK and understanding whether policies to improve individuals’ wellbeing are also likely to improve their productivity is crucial,” Professor Vignoles said.

̽��ֱ��fulcrum for Cambridge’s involvement in the new Productivity Institute will be the ̽��ֱ��’s recently established Bennett Institute for Public Policy, where Professor Coyle is based.

Since its launch in 2018, the Bennett Institute has been concentrating on the “challenges posed by the productivity puzzle” in the UK, says the Institute’s Director Professor Michael Kenny, with a focus on ensuring notions of “place” are brought to the fore.

“We are delighted to be contributing to this major new initiative,” said Kenny. “Under the leadership of Professor Coyle, we have been working to understand the many different factors and dynamics which explain the well-springs of, and obstacles to, productivity growth.”

Professor Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said: “I am thrilled that the ̽��ֱ�� will be playing a pivotal role in the new Productivity Institute.”

“ ̽��ֱ��knowledge generated by universities such as ours is a fuel for productivity, and will be fundamental to the resilience of the United Kingdom, and the opportunities afforded its citizens, in a post-pandemic world.”

Science Minister Amanda Solloway said: “Improving productivity is central to driving forward our long-term economic recovery and ensuring that we level up wages and living standards across every part of the UK."

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� is to be a key partner in a new national effort to boost British productivity, bringing together expertise to tackle questions of job creation, sustainability and wellbeing, as the UK looks to its post-pandemic future.

Productivity is key to the creation of decent work and the provision of high quality education and healthcare

Diane Coyle

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes