NHS AI Partnerships Must Be Treated as Commercial Relationships
In 2015, DeepMind proposed building an app to catch acute kidney injury at the Royal Free Hospital. The company's founders claimed it would be a research mission rather than a commercial contract.
Nine years later, co-founder Demis Hassabis stepped back from running the company and handed day-to-day control to a Google veteran based in California.
The Streams app that emerged from this partnership went on to breach the Data Protection Act. In 2017, 1.6 million patient records had been shared with DeepMind without adequate consent or proper legal basis.
NHS leaders are being warned not to rely solely on a company's mission-driven pitch when entering into partnerships. They should treat every such partnership as a commercial relationship first and a mission-driven collaboration second.