DeepMind health team officially joins Google Health

In November, DeepMind announced that its Stream medical assistant would be joining Google Health. That transition is official today, and includes existing healthcare partners.

DeepMind is a machine learning and artificial intelligence research company under Alphabet. Last year, Google proper started a health initiative to coordinate various medical-related efforts. This includes projects housed in Search, Google AI, Google Fit, and even rumors of Nest making health devices.

The latest addition is an “AI-powered assistant for nurses and doctors” known as Streams. This tool can help spot symptoms earlier by analyzing patient data and is already leveraged in the UK. With today’s announcement, the new Google effort confirmed that existing partnerships with the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, and Taunton and Somerset NHS Foundation Trust will be transitioned over.

Google notes how the 10-month period from announcement to officially joining was born out of making sure there was “proper time and care to make sure that we had the full consent and cooperation of our partners.”

This included giving them the time to ask questions and fully understand our plans and to choose whether to continue our partnerships. As has always been the case, our partners are in full control of all patient data and we will only use patient data to help improve care, under their oversight and instructions.

The joint effort touts benefits relating to Google’s scale and access to consumer-focused development resources:

We’ll now be able to tap into global expertise in areas like app development, data security, cloud storage, and user-centered design to build products that support care teams and improve patient outcomes.