Google’s DeepMind agrees new deal to share NHS patient data

Jose Luis Pelaez Inc/Getty

By Victoria Turk

Google’s DeepMind has announced a five-year agreement with a UK National Health Service (NHS) trust that will give it access to patient data to develop and deploy its healthcare app, Streams.

The new partnership follows an earlier agreement, the details of which New Scientist first revealed in April, which generated concerns over the amount and nature of data made available to DeepMind.

The Streams app is designed to deliver an alert about a patient’s condition to a doctor’s or nurse’s cellphone in a similar way to getting a news notification. It will initially be used from 2017 to spot people at risk of kidney problems, but is due to be expanded over the five years to include other functions such as detecting blood poisoning and coordinating patient treatment.

The Royal Free

DeepMind is working on the project with the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, which oversees Barnet, Chase Farm and Royal Free hospitals.

“One of the things that really motivates my staff is the opportunity to use our technologies to work on some of the toughest and most complex social problems, and there’s none more important and timely now than trying to improve the NHS,” says DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman.

iPhone app

The app delivers information to iPhones in the form of push notifications, reminders or alerts. Its current version focuses on acute kidney injury (AKI). To detect people at risk of AKI, the Streams system processes information from blood tests – as well as other data, such as patient observations and histories – and flags any anomalous results to a clinician.

DeepMind plans to further develop Streams so it alerts doctors about people who need urgent attention, for example because of blood poisoning or organ failure, and can act as a general communication platform for clinicians.

The AKI version of the app will be deployed across the Royal Free London hospitals next year. It is now registered as a medical device with the Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.

David Sloman, chief executive of the Royal Free London trust, says the app will help medical staff intervene more quickly when people are at risk of AKI. “This is about organising and escalating information far more rapidly and, as a consequence, this will save lives,” he says.

While the AKI app relies mainly on markers in blood tests to assess a person’s risk, DeepMind has access to much more patient data. Suleyman says it needs “contextual information” like patient histories “so the nurse or doctor can make a well-rounded, holistic assessment of that patient who happens to be at risk at that moment”.

Sensitive issue

This kind of healthcare information is naturally very sensitive. Data is collected from the 1.6 million people who pass through the hospitals involved each year, not just those who may end up benefiting from the app. After New Scientist revealed the extent of the data shared between the trust and DeepMind in April, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office began investigating the data-sharing agreement.

A spokesperson for the office says it has been in contact with the Royal Free and DeepMind and that: “Our investigation into the sharing of patient information between the Royal Free NHS Trust and DeepMind is ongoing. We are working with the national data guardian to ensure the project complies with the Data Protection Act.”

A coordinator at medConfidential, which advocates for confidentiality and consent in healthcare, says it has the same questions about the new agreement as it did about the last one: principally, why DeepMind needs access to so much data. “Our concern is not about the app. It’s about the fact that they’re getting data on everybody in hospital,” the coordinator says.

Data compliance

Sloman says the data sharing complies with all the standards that govern how hospitals manage data.

Suleyman adds that the Streams system encrypts information when it is transmitted and stored, and this always remains in the UK. DeepMind has also appointed nine unpaid reviewers to scrutinise the work and given them a budget to commission audits and reviews, he says.

As for what Google and DeepMind get out of the partnership, Suleyman says they benefit from working directly with doctors and nurses to find out what tools would improve their work.

Scaling up requires a “sustainable business model that drives uptake”, says Suleyman.

“We want to be able to work with new trusts in the future because we’ve been able to deliver concrete, measurable clinical value, and I think that’s what’s going to provide the scale,” he says.

Sloman says the Royal Free London pays DeepMind a “modest service fee”.