What can we learn from DeepMind/Royal Free?

We’ve been following developments with Google DeepMind, the Royal Free NHS Foundation Trust and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) this week with great interest. Why? Because if we collectively get things wrong now, it has the potential to derail the evolution of analytics and machine learning in the NHS and healthcare for many years to come. And if the brakes are put on innovation in this area, the biggest losers will be the patients who fail to benefit from potentially life-saving advances.

Given this backdrop, we were pleased to see that after a year-long investigation into the Google DeepMind/Royal Free case, Monday’s much-anticipated ruling from the Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, was considered and proportionate. In her blog accompanying the ruling, Denham was at pains to point out that it’s not a choice between privacy or innovation and that organisations need to learn lessons from this case as they increasingly look to unlock the huge potential that creative uses of data can have for patient care. 

TechMarketView PublicSectoriViews subscribers can read our analysis in Digital Health: lessons from DeepMind/Royal Free published today.