Balancing Usability with Governance

In this episode of Talking HealthTech, Peter Birch speaks with Declan Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Eolas Medical, about the challenges and opportunities in healthcare knowledge management.

They explore how clinicians can better access both external medical evidence and context-specific internal knowledge, the importance of technology in surfacing reliable information at the point of care, and the emerging role of artificial intelligence in supporting decision making in healthcare environments.

Key Takeaways:

📚 Knowledge Management in Healthcare: Declan explains that clinicians need access to both external, evidence-based guidelines and internal, site-specific procedures to make informed decisions. Both are often difficult to surface when needed, leading to inefficiency and frustration.

💡 Origin of Eolas Medical: The platform was created out of a real need identified within hospitals—difficulty in finding practical information quickly, particularly context-specific pathways and contacts. "Eolas" is derived from the Irish word for knowledge.

🤖 Technology and Extraction: Eolas uses computer vision and artificial intelligence to extract and visually ground information from both internal documents (like policies and flowcharts buried on intranets) and external sources, ensuring that clinicians can trace answers to their original sources.

🔒 AI's Role and Safety Considerations: Artificial intelligence, especially large language models, can support information retrieval but must be carefully governed, regulated, and validated for safety and trust. The adoption of such solutions varies globally due to differing regulatory environments.

⚖️ Balancing Usability and Governance: Declan shares the tension between making technology user-friendly for clinicians and maintaining rigorous governance, security, and privacy—finding the right balance is ongoing and vital for uptake.

📈 Adoption and Impact: Eolas has seen significant uptake among clinicians by addressing their need for immediate, trustworthy, actionable information at the point of care. The company emphasises a careful, department-by-department rollout in healthcare organisations to build evidence and trust.

🚀 Future Directions: The conversation touches on the broad future of healthcare technology, speculating about the combined power of AI, knowledge management, and system interoperability over the next decades.

Check out the episode and full show notes on the Talking HealthTech website.

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