Google DeepMind works with NHS doctors on life-saving app

The app, Streams, has already been piloted in the Royal Free Hospital in North London where it was used to detect patients at greatest risk of acute kidney injury, and will also be trialled at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington.

The condition is a sudden loss of kidney function, often a consequence of dehydration, and normally associated with death. “We can detect from blood test results which patients are at risk,” said the co-founder of DeepMind Mustafa Suleyman. “25 per cent of deaths are preventable, so there’s a really big prize for us.”

This is the company's first indication of how it plans to apply machine learning algorithms to solve massive real world problems. 

"A very simple [technological] tool can be more impactful than a dose of antibiotics.”

Lord Ara Darzi

While refining its real-time diagnosis of dangerous illnesses including acute kidney injury and sepsis, DeepMind is also working with top surgeon and head of Imperial Health Partners, Professor Lord Ara Darzi and Dr Dominic King on integrating their healthcare task-prioritising app Hark into the DeepMind Health platform.

Hark addresses the second part of the problem in clinical healthcare – how best to intervene and prioritise doctors’ and nurses’ time when someone is critically ill. “The first part is detecting which patients are at risk, and then how we manage all the various clinical interventions is what Hark does,” Suleyman said.