Jameel Clinic at MIT and Wellcome launch AI Hospital Network

The Jameel Clinic, the epicentre of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), co-founded by MIT and Community Jameel in 2018, announced today, in partnership with Wellcome, the launch of the Jameel Clinic AI Hospital Network, a new initiative which aims to roll out clinical AI tools at 35 hospitals across eight countries, including Mexico, India and Taiwan. The network is supported by the Jameel Clinic and Wellcome.

In countries with low-resourced health systems, hospitals and public health agencies are increasingly strained by emerging health challenges, including climate change, sedentary lifestyles, as well as a number of issues due to increased life expectancy, resulting in a rise in non-communicable, neurodegenerative, and infectious diseases. The past decade has seen significant breakthroughs in clinical AI technologies in all areas of clinical care, including risk assessment and diagnostics, treatment personalisation, and the prediction of outcomes. If adopted into everyday clinical practice, these technologies have great potential to save lives, improve quality of care, and control costs for clinical care institutions.

Central to the missions of both the Jameel Clinic and Wellcome is a commitment to ensuring new healthcare technologies are developed and deployed equitably, including in low and middle income countries. The broad deployment and testing of AI technologies through the Jameel Clinic AI Hospital Network will offer hospitals free of charge access to a repository of cutting-edge AI tools as they mature enough to become integrated into the clinical pipeline. The tools deployed will cover a range of clinical applications, allowing hospitals to select the ones relevant to their needs. The network seeks to develop procedures for the safe and effective deployment of AI tools in specific clinical contexts, test AI tools to ensure equitable health outcomes, and refine tool development to optimise their clinical utility.

In addition to the AI tools, which will span multiple therapeutic areas, the network will also offer backline support to the hospitals’ IT networks and access to support, resources, and partners through the Jameel Clinic. The Jameel Clinic will further facilitate all stages of deployment, from IT support to educating physicians about clinical AI. This process will allow the Jameel Clinic to collect critical feedback on adoption, ease of use, and usefulness of these algorithms in real-world contexts. The hospitals’ clinicians will utilise the AI tools in compliance with patient-related regulations and provide feedback on the application of the AI tools and their utilisation in real-life clinical settings, including statistics on usability, error rate, and user comments.

Professor Regina Barzilay, AI faculty lead at the MIT Jameel Clinic, said: “With machine learning, we have the capacity to bring about truly transformative change in healthcare and that can only happen if we effectively deploy machine learning models in real-world settings, into hospitals and medical centres with clinicians and patients. Building a robust coalition of researchers, clinicians, hospitals, and public health actors is critical to realising the benefits of major advances in machine learning in the detection and treatment of diseases."

Tariq Khokhar, head of data for science and health at Wellcome, said: “In recent years, there's been a proliferation of AI tools in health - a trend that only increased during the pandemic. But many of them have not been rigorously tested in diverse clinical settings with patients from different backgrounds. This will be crucial to making sure tools are effective and contribute to better health outcomes. We’re delighted to support the Jameel Clinic AI Hospital Network, to develop methods to roll out clinical AI tools in safe and effective ways, ultimately improving people’s health and saving lives.”

George Richards, director of Community Jameel, said: “We are excited to see the Jameel Clinic AI Hospital Network open a pathway for the deployment of new AI tools into clinical settings. By partnering with clinicians and hospitals in countries that are under-represented in the field of AI and health, the Jameel Clinic at MIT is advancing an equitable, participatory, peer-to-peer model for healthcare innovation that can save lives.”

As part of its efforts to bring to light the potential for change in healthcare through the adoption of AI tools, the Jameel Clinic, Community Jameel, and Wellcome will host a one-day seminar in Dubai, titled AI Cures MENASA: Clinical AI and data solutions for health, which will mark the Jameel Clinic AI Hospital Network’s first venture into the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia regions. The event will take place on December 20, 2022 at the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai.

The Jameel Clinic seeks to change the landscape of healthcare by developing AI technologies for early diagnostics, drug discovery, and care personalisation and management.  The Jameel Clinic emphasises translating discoveries into technologies that can improve people’s lives by supporting research and educational activities in the AI / healthcare space and collaborating with hospitals, industry partners, and foundations. The Jameel Clinic’s work has resulted in breakthrough discoveries including the new antibiotic Halicin, the breast cancer early detection tool Mirai and the lung cancer early detection tool Sybil.