Google Inc.’s DeepMind team has become one of the best-known artificial intelligence research groups in the world thanks to a few major breakthroughs, most notably AlphaGo’s victory earlier this year. Now, DeepMind has formed a landmark five-year partnership with the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, part of the U.K.’s National Health Service.

In a blog post announcing the new partnership Tuesday, DeepMind cofounder and Head of Applied AI Mustafa Suleyman explained that the U.K.’s current hospital system still largely relies on outdated technology such as pagers and fax machines.

“This slow and outdated technology means that important changes in a patient’s condition often don’t get brought to the attention of the right clinician in time to prevent further serious illness,” Suleyman said. “When this doesn’t happen, the consequences for patients can be severe, and even fatal.”

Suleyman noted that roughly 40 percent of patients could avoid intensive care if they were able to be treated sooner, and streamlining patient care processes could have an enormous impact on healthcare. DeepMind hopes to do this partly through an app called Streams, which is co-developed with the NHS over the last year.

Streams essentially brings the doctor’s pager into the modern era by providing continuous updates about patient information, particularly test results. The app is able to alert the proper clinicians if a patient’s test results require immediate action, ensuring that treatment can begin as soon as possible.

Streams initially began as a way to alert doctors if a patient is at risk of developing acute kidney injury. But Suleyman said that DeepMind will be expanding the app’s functions to include other illnesses as well as requested features such as messaging and clinical task management.

“When it’s fully built, we believe that this will speed up the time to alert nurses and doctors to patients in need down from hours to a few seconds,” Suleyman said. “And by freeing up clinicians’ time from juggling multiple pager, desktop-based and paper systems, it should redirect over half a million hours per year away from admin and towards direct patient care at the Royal Free alone.”

This not DeepMind’s first or only partnership with the NHS. Earlier this year, DeepMind launched a trial program at Moorfields Eye Hospital, a London hospital that specializes in diagnosing and treating eye ailments such as glaucoma, cataracts, macular degeneration and others. At Moorfields, DeepMind uses a combination of computer vision and machine learning to analyze eye scans with the goal of helping doctors quickly and accurately detect problems so they can begin treatment immediately.

Privacy concerns

While streamlining patient care is a worthwhile goal, critics have questioned whether DeepMind will be able to ensure patient privacy with healthcare data being shared across its networks. Suleyman said DeepMind has put several protections in place to keep patient information secure.

“All data access is logged, and subject to review by the Royal Free as well as DeepMind Health’s nine Independent Reviewers,” Suleyman said. “Our software and data centres will also undergo deep technical audits by experts commissioned by our Independent Reviewers.”

He added that DeepMind will be building an entirely new infrastructure that will allow the Royal Free to conduct ongoing audits of its systems. That means that administrators will be able to see who accessed a patient’s information and for what purpose.

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