Scaling Streams with Google

We’re excited to announce that the team behind Streams - our mobile app that supports doctors and nurses to deliver faster, better care to patients - will be joining Google.

It’s been a phenomenal journey to see Streams go from initial idea to live deployment, and to hear how it’s helped change the lives of patients and the nurses and doctors who treat them. The arrival of world-leading health expert Dr. David Feinberg at Google will accelerate these efforts, helping to make a difference to the lives of millions of patients around the world.

This is a major milestone for DeepMind! One of the reasons for joining forces with Google in 2014 was the opportunity to use Google’s scale and experience in building billion-user products to bring our breakthroughs more rapidly to the wider world. It’s been amazing to put this into practice in data centre efficiency, Android battery life, text-to-speech applications, and now the work of our Streams team.

Over the past three years we’ve built a team of experts in what it takes to deploy clinical tools in practice - engineers, clinicians, translational researchers and more. In that time, we’ve also made major advances in healthcare AI research: detecting eye disease more quickly and accurately than experts; planning cancer radiotherapy treatment in seconds rather than hours; and working to detect patient deterioration from electronic records.

Our vision is for Streams to now become an AI-powered assistant for nurses and doctors everywhere - combining the best algorithms with intuitive design, all backed up by rigorous evidence. The team working within Google, alongside brilliant colleagues from across the organisation, will help make this vision a reality.

The Streams team will remain in London, under the leadership of former NHS surgeon and researcher Dr Dominic King. We’re fully committed to all our NHS partners, and to delivering on our current projects and more. We’ll be working closely with them as we plan for the team’s transition, and information governance and safety remain our top priorities. Patient data remains under our partners’ strict control, and all decisions about its use will continue to lie with them.

As a research organisation, DeepMind will continue to lead the way in fundamental research applying AI to important science and medical research questions, in collaboration with academic partners, to accelerate scientific progress for the benefit of everyone.

Over the coming years, we expect AI to help scientists make transformative advances on problems ranging from protein folding to image analysis, potentially improving medical diagnosis, drug discovery and much more. We’re excited to play our part in that journey both at DeepMind and at Google, in the service of patients and clinicians around the world.