By Enzo Daniele     @EnzoDaniele_

The next time you visit a hospital: put your tech goggles on! Can you see the 21st century tech being used? If you go to one of my NHS Trust partners you’ll see modern technology being used everywhere: old dusty desktops are disappearing; no more doctors squinting at foil x-ray images held up against the light. Today our NHS Trusts are modernising their IT landscape with solutions like End User Computing for staff mobility and digitised imaging, all helping clinicians to help patients.

I love to see new tech being applied in healthcare, so when I read what’s about to happen with Google DeepMind AI in healthcare I can see it being a game changer for improving patient outcomes.

Google DeepMind in the NHS

This recent update from Google DeepMind on how their Healthcare unit is progressing gives an insight into what’s coming next. First, check out the new talent they’ve added: these people grok the NHS:

“Former Google Maps team leader Andrew Eland has been brought in to head up DeepMind Health's engineering efforts, while Will Cavendish, a former civil servant that worked on NHS online booking and prescription services, has joined as strategy lead. Elsewhere, ex-GE Healthcare executive Cathy Harris has been appointed as DeepMind Health's product lead.”

And look at these projects that they are working on. In my mind there’s no better use for technology than saving and improving people’s lives:

Google DeepMind has announced three NHS partnerships so far, including  an eyecare project, a  kidney monitoring project and a cancer detection project.

There are three things that that strike me about DeepMind in the NHS:

This isn’t just a technology answer looking for a problem.

It's not a "solution" being “pushed” onto a reluctant NHS.

It isn’t a “Death Star” public sector project that will take forever and cost billions.

DeepMind in the NHS is looking like a grassroots, bottom up adoption of artificial intelligence driven by the front line of clinicians, doctors, patients, researchers. These experts across all the Trusts are asking and suggesting how the DeepMind team how AI can be applied to healthcare to complement nurses, doctors and surgeons to improve patient outcomes.

The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed

There was an excellent article in The Raconteur recently covering what’s happening today in healthcare, proof that AI in Healthcare is a reality rather than a futuristic maybe. They make an excellent point that AI isn’t about replacing humans and their jobs, it’s about complementing and working with human specialists and helping them do more than they can on their own. Checking a patient’s healthcare record against a database of diseases is yielding a 91% diagnostic accuracy and improving on nurse and doctor assessment.

What makes these machine-learning systems so powerful is their ability to find patterns in datasets too large and complex for human brains to comprehend

From my daily work with the NHS I know this isn’t a shoe-in, it’s going to be complicated, and Google DeepMind acknowledge this. If Google DeepMind get this bit right, it’s scary-good thinking what might be possible:

"We also know that working in health is complicated, and we need many different types of expertise if we’re to build tools that have real clinical impact, integrate well with the needs and existing infrastructure of the NHS, and set ever higher standards for privacy and security. We don’t underestimate this challenge at all.”

Who cares about Google DeepMind work in the NHS? Everyone! Whether you’re a technologist, an AI specialist, a healthcare worker but especially as a patient, which we all are. I’m interested as an NHS partner... fireworks are going off in my head thinking about the opportunities to improve patient outcomes with this new field.

Is AI about to move from the “fun but not useful” world of quirky personal assistants and beating humans at Go? Is it going make a material improvement to people’s lives?

It will be if the NHS goes "all in on AI"!