Open source platform launched to scale health AI innovation

An open source platform has been launched to support large-scale development of healthcare AI while ensuring patient data is secure.

The AI Centre at King’s College London and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust have launched the federated learning interoperability platform (FLIP) to enable secure AI collaboration across health systems.

FLIP allows AI models to be trained across one or multiple institutions while data stays within secure local environments.

Professor Sebastien Ourselin, head of the school of biomedical engineering and imaging sciences at King’s College London, said: “Healthcare AI has reached a point where meaningful progress depends on collaboration at scale.

“With FLIP, we are creating an open, NHS-led resource that allows clinicians and researchers to safely harness data across institutions, accelerate innovation, and position the NHS as a global leader in responsible AI development.”

Unlike centralised, vendor-controlled AI research platforms, FLIP is designed to give participating organisations full control over their data, approvals, and ethics processes.

By enabling models to learn from a wider range of data, the platform can improve patient care by increasing accuracy of diagnosis, support earlier detection of disease, and helping to bring innovation into care more quickly.

Institutions can deploy FLIP locally to develop AI models using only their own data, with the option available for federated collaboration across sites.

The AI Centre provides clinical leadership and research excellence, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust serves as steward and long-term operator of the platform at NHS scale, and deepc contributes infrastructure expertise in AI lifecycle operations.

Franz Pfister, chief executive at deepc, said: “FLIP provides the foundational infrastructure needed for the next generation of healthcare AI.

“As foundation models and multimodal approaches become central to medical innovation, open and interoperable platforms are essential to ensure innovation translates into earlier diagnoses, more personalised treatment decisions, and better patient outcomes.”

Initial programmes running on FLIP are demonstrating federated AI capabilities across diverse clinical applications, including radiology, multimodal inflammatory diseases, and the development of digital biomarkers.

Researchers, in partnership with St John’s Institute of Dermatology, are developing digital biomarkers for inflammatory skin disease using multimodal data.

The project combines imaging with structured and unstructured clinical data, showing how federated infrastructure can enable real-world model development across institutions.

FLIP is available for research on multi-modal data with healthcare providers, researchers, and innovators worldwide invited to adopt, contribute to, and build upon the platform.

The system was developed within the NHS ecosystem in collaboration with OneLondon and Flower Labs.