Patients have a vital role to play in helping to set our priorities and working with us to design new products and services. But we’re still learning how to get this right. There are many exceptional people with far more experience of patient involvement than we have, and yesterday’s event was a chance to meet some of them, explain what we’ve done so far, and ask their advice about what to do next.

We heard some valuable feedback about how we can make our work with patients accessible to a wider group, including holding events in other parts of the country and at times of the day when people at work can attend, and ensuring that people who are unable to travel can still have their say.

We also heard insights about some of the most important and complex long-term issues we need to address together. These included the need for new security models in healthcare that can protect data and inspire trust, for business models that are transparent and closely tied to outcomes that actually matter to patients, and for clinical uses of AI to use methods and outputs that are verifiable by patients and clinicians. None of these topics are easy, and so we’re committed to debating them openly and finding solutions together.

We were also excited to hear concrete recommendations for the tools and services we should build. We heard about the importance of including community care as well as hospitals, and of incorporating patients’ input about their conditions rather than only relying on data from clinical tests. We were glad for the opportunity to ask for some early feedback about how patients could have greater access to their own health data – an early concept, but one we’re looking forward to exploring further with patients in the months and years ahead.

Source: https://deepmind.com/blog/announcements/putting-patients-heart-deepmind-health