How AI Could Help Clinical Audits and Registries

As part of Clinical Audit Awareness Week 2026 (CAAW26), Chris Boulton, NJR Registry (NJR) Director of Operations, looked at how AI could support clinical registries, where it has the greatest potential, and some of the challenges that still need to be addressed. 

Artificial intelligence is hard to avoid at the moment. Every week seems to bring another announcement or new tool. While most of the attention has been on large language models like ChatGPT, AI covers a much wider range of technologies, many of which could have practical uses in healthcare. 

Like many organisations, we’re trying to separate the genuine opportunities from the hype. AI is developing quickly, but that doesn’t mean every new idea will improve healthcare. Our job is to understand where it can make a practical difference and where existing approaches remain the better option. 

The National Joint Registry (NJR), which is hosted by Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP), exists to improve patient safety by recording, monitoring, analysing and reporting the outcomes of joint replacement surgery. Since it was established in 2003, it has become the largest joint replacement registry in the world, holding more than 4.65 million procedure records and receiving around 250,000 new records every year. 

That scale creates opportunities that simply didn’t exist a decade ago. The NJR already supports implant surveillance, clinical audit, research and quality improvement. As the volume of data continues to grow, AI offers another way of analysing that information and finding patterns that would otherwise be difficult to detect. 

My CAAW26 presentation focused on a few key areas where AI could make the biggest difference. You can read more about these here.