Health IG Companion
Somewhere in your trust, one person is signing off the AI arriving in your clinic. This is a tool that makes that signature safer to give.
Before a digital tool reaches your patients, these names go on it:
Each of them is personally accountable. None of them can check what they are signing.
Why not
A safety case is a document — thirty pages of prose, written by the supplier, describing what the supplier has done. The person asked to sign it can read it and trust it, or read it and delay. There is no third option, because nothing in it can be verified.
A national study sent freedom of information requests to all 239 NHS organisations in England. More than 10,000 digital tools in NHS use have no documented assurance against the mandatory clinical safety standards. In a typical trust, three out of four digital tools influencing patient care.
Mean clinical safety officer capacity: 1.1 whole-time equivalent, per organisation, for every digital system in it.
That is not negligence. It is arithmetic.
What this does
The companion turns those obligations into checks a computer can run. Each rule cites the published requirement it comes from — a UK GDPR article, a DCB standard clause, the Records Management Code. A supplier's claims become signed facts, each recording who attested it, when, and against what evidence.
What arrives at the trust is a bundle that can be verified independently, from public keys, without trusting whoever sent it.
The signatures above still belong to the people named. Nothing here replaces them, and nothing should. The point is that they can check what they are putting their name to.
Where it has got to
This is working software, not a product. It has never run in a live service and no organisation has adopted it. It has not been shown to save anyone any time, because that has not been measured.
The rule set was reviewed line by line against the published standards. That review found seven of its own rules citing no published requirement at all. Those have been moved into an optional profile and labelled as proposals rather than obligations. The review is published in full, including what was wrong and how it was found.
A response drawing on this work has been submitted to NHS England's national review of DCB0129 and DCB0160.
The code and the review are on GitHub Apache 2.0, with a clause transferring the project to NHS England on request. No company, nothing for sale.