INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
DeepMind recent foray into providing software as a service to U.K
hospitals has reached the end of its run.
The Google -owned AI division has just announced it will be stepping back from providing a
clinical alerts and task management healthcare app to focus on research —handing off the team doing the day to day delivery of the Streams
to its parent, Google.
It been a phenomenal journey to see Streams go from initial idea to live deployment, and to hear how it helped
change the lives of patients and the nurses and doctors who treat them
https://t.co/rTcFMebuFp
— Mustafa Suleyman (@mustafasuleymn) November 13, 2018
Announcing the move in a blog post entitled &Scaling
Streams with Google,& DeepMind co-founders write: &Our vision is for Streams to now become an AI-powered assistant for nurses and doctors
everywhere — combining the best algorithms with intuitive design, all backed up by rigorous evidence
The team working within Google, alongside brilliant colleagues from across the organisation, will help make this vision a reality.&
DeepMind
2015 plunge into the health apps space always looked like a curious departure for an AI specialist because — despite the above quote —
the Streams app does not use any AI.
Rather, it uses a National Health Service algorithm
The design of the app was also outsourced to a U.K.-based app studio.
Yet DeepMind began its foray into health with grand ambitions about
applying AI to patient data, quietly inking an expansive data-sharing arrangement plus memorandum of understanding with an NHS Trust to get
access to millions of patients& full (and fully identifiable) medical records,as wereported at the time.
It also made a 2015 ethics
application with the NHS& Health Research Authority to apply AI to the patient data.Though itlater said it quickly realized that clinicians&
&most urgent problems& were rather more fundamental than a pressing need to rush into experiments with AI
(And DeepMind has always maintained that the patient data it obtained under its arrangement with the Royal Free NHS Trust, with whom the
Streams app was co-developed, was never used for AI.)
The Streams project ran into major controversy in May 2016when fuller details emerged
about the scope and terms of the data-sharing underpinning the app — and questions started being asked about data governance due process,
legal bases for data-sharing andGoogle role and potential interest in people medical records.
After a year, the initial data-sharing
arrangement between DeepMind and the Royal Free was scrapped andreplaced with a tighter contract
(You can download a redacted version of the contract published by DeepMind here.)
Then last year the U.K
data protection watchdog ruled the firstarrangement had breached U.K
law— with the information commissioner saying patients &would not have reasonably expected& their sensitive medical records to be used for
developing an app.
Although by then the Streams app had already been deployed into Royal Free hospitals
And DeepMind hadinked a few more deals with NHS Trusts to use the app.
It also emerged that DeepMind was providing Streams to Trusts
essentially free of charge for the first five years
And apanel of external reviewers engaged by DeepMind with the aim of boosting trust warned in their annual review earlier this year of the
risk of it &exert[ing] excessive monopoly power& as a result of adata access and streaming infrastructurebundled with the Streams app.
The
whole episode opened a Pandora box of data governance, privacy and trust issues — which DeepMind now appears to be dumping directly onto
Google, which will now be fully in the frame as the health app provider (and patient data handler) behind Streams.
&The Streams team will
remain in London, under the leadership of former NHS surgeon and researcher Dr Dominic King,& write the DeepMind co-founders now
&We&re fully committed to all our NHS partners, and to delivering on our current projects and more
We&ll be working closely with them as we plan for the team transition, and information governance and safety remain our top priorities
Patient data remains under our partners& strict control, and all decisions about its use will continue to lie with them.&
They add that
DeepMind role from here on in will be focused on research, rather than software as a service, saying:&As a research organisation, DeepMind
will continue to work on fundamental health research with partners in academia, the NHS and beyond
When we have promising results that could have impact at scale, we&ll work closely with the Streams and translational research teams at
Google on how to implement research ideas into clinical settings.&
So provision of any health AIs that DeepMind develops in the future will
be left to Google to deploy and scale
(And on the scale front Google might be feeling buoyed by theU.K
new minister for health being very pro-app.)
As will the task of winning patient trust — which may well prove the biggest challenge
here.
The trustissue was also flagged by DeepMind independent reviewers last year, when they wrote in their annual report:&As far as we can
ascertain, DMH [DeepMind Health] does not share its data with Google, yet the public perception that this might be the case, now or in the
future, will be difficult to overcome and has the potential to delay or undermine work that could be of great potential benefit to
patients.&
It not clear whether Google will engage a panel of independent reviewers to oversee its provision of Streams going forward, as
We&ve asked the company to confirm its intention vis-à-vis oversight.
Update:A spokesperson has now told us: &The Independent Reviewers
Panel was a governance structure forDeepMindHealth as a UK entity
Now Streams is going to part of a global effort this is unlikely to be the right structure in the future.&
