911½ñÈÕºÚÁÏ

iCARE Fellow Guillaume Rousson compared French and UK approaches to patient experience, data, and AI in healthcare.

This summer, iCARE Digital Collaboration Space welcomed Guillaume Rousson, a French physiotherapist and PhD candidate in health management at the Magellan research center, Laelyon School of Management, Lyon University, for a two-month visiting fellowship. Guillaume has a unique academic and professional background, combining physiotherapy with training in health policy and sociology. His doctoral research focuses on co-management with service users in public health organisations, with particular attention to patient experience and engagement. His thesis is titled “Managing intangibles in Healthcare: testing a method including the voice of users into the performance assessment of health organizations.”

Alongside his PhD, Guillaume co-founded , a company that develops tools for analysing free-text patient experience data to inform quality improvement. His platform is now deployed across more than 50 hospitals in France and Belgium.

During his fellowship at iCARE Secure Data Environment & Digital Collaboration Space, Guillaume sought to compare approaches in France and the UK to collecting and implementing patient experience data. He was particularly interested in how large-scale natural language processing (NLP) tools are developed, deployed, and used across NHS Trusts, and how patients are engaged in this process. His interest was focused on the successful Health Foundation & NIHR 911½ñÈÕºÚÁÏ Biomedical Research Centre funded Scale, Spread and Embed patient experience tool: informing person-centred health and social care provision, which has scaled across the NHS and won national awards for Digital Health Innovation and Patient-centred Care at the and the Patient Experience Network National Awards.

Guillaume provided a Keynote lecture at the and provided a unique perspective of how he has implemented AI interventions into direct healthcare delivery based on his experience in France.

We sat down with Guillaume at the end of his time in London to hear about his experiences, reflections, and future plans.

What have you learned during your fellowship?

This is the journey of a PHD research project consisting of an international comparison between France and the UK. It is only a beginning, but I have already conducted conversations and interviews with participants involved in the iCARE Spread, Scale & Embed project, including lay partners and multi-disciplinary staff from several NHS Trusts.

I wanted to understand their roles in the project, particularly how the tool is deployed, how patients are involved in its implementation, and how the analysis and visualisation tools transform patient experience data into quality improvement. It has been fascinating to see how implementation varies between hospitals, depending on the team leading it and the resources available.

How would you compare the approaches in France and the UK?

In France, we have developed a single platform designed to be used across hospitals. In the UK, the approach is different. Rather than a one-size-fits-all tool, iCARE provides algorithms for natural language processing and visualisation, which individual Trusts then implement in their own way.

This creates a more tailored and patient-centred approach. For example, in one Trust the patient experience team is leading implementation, while in another it is led by a quality improvement team. Larger hospitals with data teams and AI engineers can adapt the algorithms further, whereas smaller hospitals may lack such expertise and instead use the tools more directly.

What has surprised you most about the UK health system?

The first thing was the truly multi-disciplinary nature of the iCARE Team I was immersed in (data scientists, data engineers, clinicians, allied healthcare professionals, academics, programme managers, IT delivery staff). In France, it is very difficult to recruit such staff into publicly funded research teams, since their expertise is highly valued in the private sector. On my visiting fellowship I met many engineers and data scientists working collaboratively towards directly impactful health research, which makes large-scale data projects possible.

The second thing was the close links between public research teams, NHS Trusts, and private companies. During the summer school, for example, we visited , , and . These public–private collaborations provide resources and expertise that are much harder to establish in France. The life science agenda enabled through iCARE and Paddington Life Sciences is unique for transformational AI Research.

What lessons will you take forward into your own research?

My next step is to conduct further interviews, including with programme managers and additional staff at Great Ormond Street Hospital. I will also collect examples of quality improvement initiatives based on patient experience data and NLP analysis.

These will allow me to compare French and UK approaches in more depth and integrate the findings into my PhD thesis. I intend to publish with & the iCARE team on the considerations needed across international healthcare systems for AI implementation, as well as on patient participation in these projects.

In France, we involve patients at every stage of development and implementation. Here, I observed less direct patient involvement in hospital implementation, although there was a lay partner in the research steering committee. It will be interesting to reflect on these differences.

How does your background as a physiotherapist influence your research?

I work as an occupational physiotherapist, offering online physiotherapy for workers with musculoskeletal disorders. Although I have not applied formal patient engagement methodologies in my clinic, I try to maintain strong relationships with patients.

My clinical work has also made me more aware of how data can be used responsibly. I am interested in how artificial intelligence can be applied to clinical practice, but also in ensuring that potential risks are understood before implementation. It has been inspiring to see that the data scientists here are also concerned with these questions, and that many projects use open-source large language models rather than relying solely on private companies. That gives me hope that clinics in the future can adopt AI tools in a transparent and ethical way.

Any final reflections?

I am grateful to the iCARE Director Erik Mayer and to the iCARE team. It has been inspiring to meet so many talented data scientists and researchers and to learn more about the NHS. This experience has been invaluable for my research and for my personal development.