Our co-founder and CTO, Nasrin was invited to join the roundtable discussion at the ‘Algorithms, Data and Regulation Workshop’ hosted by the Government Offie for Science. The event was co-chaired by Sir Mark Walport (Chief Scientific Adviser to HM Government) and Sir Michael Rawlins (Chair of MHRA). The event brought together experts and stakeholders in national health data, algorithm development and medical device regulation, for a rich discussion in the future of medicine relating to data access and governance.

Machine learning algorithms have great potential to disrupt healthcare – efficiently identifying patterns in large volumes of data and providing new insight to clinicians. They discussed the challenges that algorithms pose in terms of medical device regulation, and the data access requirements to train, validate and deploy them in the NHS. In theory, the NHS – being one of the largest unified health systems globally, is well-placed to become a world-leader in the field due to the abundance of data it has access to. It is however essential that regulation keeps up with technological innovation to ensure this data is used safely, appropriately and ethically.

We were delighted to be able to contribute to this important and evolving discussion.