DeepMind Health’s projects are ‘led’ NHS priorities, Mustafa Suleyman, the company’s Co-founder and Head of Applied AI, told BJ-HC in an interview earlier this month.
Acquired by Google in 2014, the AI hub has signed two five-year partnerships with Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust to develop an app called Streams that is set to alert clinicians as soon as patients with Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) are thought to be at risk of deterioration. Figures published by Royal Free earlier this month show the app has already been saving up to two hours of work for nurses per day.
Breaking NHS & supplier barriers?
DeepMind Health’s team involves all different kinds of experts, from mathematicians, physicists, machine learning engineer researchers or programme managers, but Suleyman revealed the ‘trick’ is getting all these people to talk to one another and getting ‘behind a vision’ that they truly believe in.
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“People thought we were crazy to go into the NHS. Many people still think we’re crazy. We’re not crazy, we’re going to make a really significant difference because most other people shy away from the really hard problems and we’ve gone to the hard problems because we care about practical impact. That’s what motivates us, we want to see things working, in production, in the real world, making a meaningful difference,” he added.
At the Interop Summit earlier this month, Dominic King, their Clinical Lead, re-emphasised Streams does not yet incorporate AI technology. Suleyman, however, stated that is their ‘long-term intention’.
“The important thing to remember is that if you want to build a real partnership, then you have to start where people are today and, you know, there is no sector that is so far away from the implementation of relatively basic, but cutting edge software, than healthcare,” he explained.
‘Super simple’ digital tools
It’s all about ‘empowering’ clinicians to do their job better, to respond to their needs, Suleyman added: “We come in and tell them here’s this fancy machine learning algorithm and they say all I need is to see blood results on my mobile phone at the right time, a super simple tool. And that’s basically how it works in partnership.”
Their current collaborations are expected to provide them with a platform that will facilitate further deployment when ‘machine learning systems’ will be considered fit to ‘work in production in the real world’.
When it comes to Imperial, Suleyman said clinicians have been ‘very involved’ in the project, understanding the need to digitise their trust ‘as fast as possible’. Furthermore, the company is in discussions with ‘lots of other trusts’.
“I’m sure there will be more announcements, but as soon as we agree a new partnership, we will publish the agreements on our website proactively and I think one of the important things to remember and I wish was acknowledged more about this is that we’ve been committed to the highest standards of governance and oversight,” Suleyman highlighted.
To support this, the company’s planning on developing a Verifiable Data Audit that would track any interference with patient data, complementing the work conducted by the Independent Reviewers initially appointed to increase transparency, needed when processing such a ‘vast amount of very sensitive personal data’, especially in healthcare.
“Any access of that data, any read, any modification, can only be done according to mandated policies and all of that is verifiable and cryptographically provable so it’s a really significant step forward that adds a very important layer of transparency into how people’s data is being managed,” Suleyman clarified.
Further expansion?
But are they interested in partnering with other healthcare systems across Europe? Although they’ve been ‘inundated’ with queries, Suleyman said they will ‘proceed’ with significant caution, scaling ‘in a very deliberate and measured way’, adding they are ‘singularly focused on patient benefits in the NHS’ at the moment: “That’s kind of what we’re going to be obsessed with for the next few years.”
Date: March 24, 2017