For many concerned with the current status of healthcare, AI innovation cannot come quickly enough. And yet, the potential of AI tools and systems to shape healthcare is as often approached with great trepidation as celebrated by health professionals and patients alike.

These fears take not only the form of privacy and security concerns but centre around the potential of AI tools to reduce patients to datapoints and professionals to aggregators — to make healthcare, in short, less caring.

This concern, we as members of the Inclusive Design for AI Healthcare Innovation Network, believe it essential we tackle head on. This, if we are not only to overcome the AI implementation gap, but realise the potential of AI systems to truly augment human-centred practices of care — championed by rather than imposed upon care workers.

We are a team of leading figures in Irish health innovation — academics and professionals spanning the Schools of Information and Communication Studies (Dr. Kevin Doherty) and Computer Science (Dr. Rob Brennan) at University College Dublin (UCD), UCD’s Innovation Academy (Jiaqi Zhang and William Davis), the National College of Art & Design (Dr. Emma Creighton and Enda O'Dowd), the HSE Spark Innovation Programme (Dermot Burke), and St James's Hospital Dublin (Dr. Marie Ward).

We are currently engaged in a programme of patient and public involved research to provide each among us the means and opportunities to engage in the co-creation of the tools which will increasingly come to shape our health.

Our mission: to grant health professionals and patients alike a voice in our increasingly digital futures; as to make a real difference for our academic communities, clinical professionals, and the general public by bridging the domains of medicine, computer science and design to realise increasingly inclusive cultures and accessible practices of responsible AI Healthcare innovation.

Watch this space!