Technology partnership to improve patient safety

A landmark technology partnership could dramatically improve patient safety and saves lives at a London hospital.

The Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust has signed a five-year agreement with British technology company DeepMind to work collaboratively to transform care through a mobile clinical application called Streams.

The technology notifies nurses and doctors immediately when test results show a patient is at risk of becoming seriously ill, providing all the information they need to take action. This will help in reducing the 10,000 people a year who die in UK hospitals through entirely preventable causes.

It is hoped that the technology will also free up clinicians’ time from juggling multiple pager, desktop-based and paper systems, redirecting over half a million hours per year towards direct patient care at the Royal Free London. This is the equivalent of having over 150 more nurses focusing on patient care. The Royal College of Physicians has reported that two in five doctors in training consider the administrative burden of their jobs to have a serious negative impact on patient safety in their hospital.

The partnership will also introduce an unprecedented level of data security and audit. All data access is logged, and subject to review by the Royal Free London as well as DeepMind Health’s nine Independent Reviewers.

David Sloman, chief executive of the Royal Free London, said: “We are hugely excited by the opportunity this partnership presents to patients and staff. We want to lead the way in healthcare technology and this new clinical app will enable us to provide safer and faster care to patients – which will save lives.

“Doctors and nurses currently spend far too much time on paperwork, and we believe this technology could substantially reduce this burden, enabling doctors and nurses to spend more time on what they do best - treating patients.”

Stephen Powis, medical director, Royal Free London, added: “Clinicians face real challenges when it comes to detecting conditions like AKI – patients deteriorate rapidly and it can be hours before this is picked up due to the limitations of current NHS technology and the reliance on manual observations and intuition. This is about bringing information to doctors and nurses, much in the way we get news alerts on our phones. We know that a quarter of deaths from AKI are preventable if clinicians are able to intervene earlier and more effectively.”

DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman said: "Our nurses and doctors are still wrestling with pagers and paper-based systems to save lives. We're working with the Royal Free to give clinicians the information they need at their fingertips, saving time and alerting them to patients in need in seconds not hours. Privacy and trust are paramount, and we're holding ourselves to an unprecedented level of oversight."

The first version of Streams is ready to be deployed to clinicians across the Royal Free Hospital sites early in 2017. Royal Free London was recently named as a ‘global exemplar’ in health technology by the Department of Health.