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Google DeepMind announces five year partnership with the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust

The five year partnership builds on the successful year-long joint project to build a smartphone app called Streams, which alerts clinical teams as soon as test results show that a patient is at risk of developing acute kidney injury (AKI) , providing them with the necessary contextual clinical information to help them to provide the right treatment before the patient’s condition deteriorates.

Following prototype testing, as well as registration with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), this first version of Streams is ready to be deployed to clinicians across the Royal Free hospital sites early in 2017.

Mustafa Suleyman, Co-Founder & Head of Applied AI said:

“Over the course of the next five years, we’re going to expand Streams to cover other illness where early intervention is key and technology can ensure this happens. We think that Streams could also be used to help patients at risk from sepsis and other causes of organ failure, where signs of deterioration are often difficult for clinicians to spot, and where early intervention can be the difference between life and death. We also plan to build additional features that Royal Free clinicians have asked for, including messaging and clinical task management that will support better care.”

“When it’s fully built, we believe that this will speed up the time to alert nurses and doctors to patients in need down from hours to a few seconds. And by freeing up clinicians’ time from juggling multiple pager, desktop-based and paper systems, it should redirect over half a million hours per year away from admin and towards direct patient care at the Royal Free alone.”

“The partnership will  introduce an unprecedented level of data security and audit. All data access is logged, and subject to review by the Royal Free as well as DeepMind Health’s nine Independent Reviewers. Our software and data centres will also undergo deep technical audits by experts commissioned by our Independent Reviewers.”

“In addition, we’re developing an unprecedented new infrastructure that will enable ongoing audit by the Royal Free, allowing administrators to easily and continually verify exactly when, where, by whom and for what purpose patient information is accessed. This is being built by one of the world’s leading security engineers, Ben Laurie, co-founder of the OpenSSL project which enables encrypted connections to websites around the world (familiar to millions through the padlock in their browser bars).”