Clinical governance in the age of AI: An interview with Dr. Charles Young
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Back in May, Dr. Charles Young joined our team at Infermedica as Chief Medical Officer. Having known Charles for a few years, I’ve already had the opportunity to tap into his expertise on more than one occasion. These many conversations made it clear to me that his combination of frontline clinical experience, strategic leadership, and digital healthcare knowledge would be invaluable as we enter the next stage of our growth.
Charles is an accomplished and still-practicing emergency physician. He is also a commercial leader and a healthcare academic with deep expertise in clinical service delivery, digital health, and clinical governance.
We took the opportunity at HLTH Europe to have a quick chat about clinical governance, the role of AI for patients, and the importance of evidence and research data when it comes to trust in AI healthcare solutions—including Charles’ take on what’s reliable and what’s not.
At a glance:
What is your role as Chief Medical Officer?
Dr. Charles Young: My role has three main components at Infermedica:
Leading our team of doctors in a medical leadership capacity.
Thinking about how we drive adoption and usage of our AI triage, and working closely with our customers to achieve that.
Leading our approach to clinical governance, which is massively important at the global scale we operate at.
How do you define clinical governance?
Dr. Charles Young: Clinical governance is the combination of clinical safety and efficiency, and that's wrapped in an appropriate level of financial control. That's the original definition of clinical governance that Scally and Donaldson came up with in the NHS some time ago.
How do you see the role of AI from a patient perspective? What challenges can AI solve for patients?
Dr. Charles Young: Broadly speaking, there are two main challenges for patients at the moment. One is the ease of access to medical services, and the second is trust. And I think AI can help in both those ways. At the moment, as a patient navigating medical services, it's difficult. It's not a convenient process. And I think using AI, especially conversational AI, to make healthcare more accessible, to make it easier for patients, to make it more comfortable for them, is really important because that drives appropriate adoption of healthcare services, and that's one of the big challenges today.
How can you build trust if you're an AI company?
Dr. Charles Young: In my experience, trust comes from understanding. If you really understand something, you can trust it. And so in our context, part of that Trust is explaining how we operate, what we do, who our team is, and also, our research data is extremely important in that context. Demonstrating to people in a formal research environment that our solutions make a very positive impact on patients' lives and their health. That's a key way to develop trust, both in patients but also in our partner organizations and the operating principles we use.
How do you know the research is actually good? What's the differentiator?
Dr. Charles Young: There are two levels of thinking about that. Most of the research published in high-impact peer-reviewed medical journals is of extremely good quality. However, I'm not saying you can take that quality for granted. On average, a paper published in Nature or Mayo Clinic Proceedings is likely to be of very good quality because their editorial procedures and processes are very robust. So, that's part one of the answer. Part two of the answer is that you need to read the research and see if you believe it. Good research is presented in a way that it’s accessible to pretty much anybody. And so, actually not taking quality for granted, reading research in detail, and thinking about what that research means is really important in terms of trust. That’s why I do so much teaching, in the UK and internationally, about how to properly appraise published research.
What would be your one piece of advice for healthcare companies?
Dr. Charles Young: It’s about quality. You have to aim for the highest quality in healthcare; quality is paramount. Quality of the process, quality of the solution, quality of the leadership of the team, and quality of the interaction with the customers and patients. Healthcare is all about quality.
Closing thoughts
Charles' emphasis on quality resonates strongly with my core values when it comes to healthcare. As AI becomes an increasingly important part of healthcare delivery, trust cannot be treated as an afterthought, it must be built into every stage of development, validation, and deployment.
At Infermedica, we believe that improving access to healthcare and creating better patient experiences starts with combining cutting-edge technology with rigorous clinical standards. That's why clinical governance, evidence, and continuous evaluation remain at the heart of everything we do.
As our industry continues to evolve, I believe the organizations that succeed will be those that pair innovation with responsibility. That's certainly the standard we continue to hold ourselves to at Infermedica, and I'm looking forward to working with Charles as we continue that journey.
For further reading, take a look at peer-reviewed papers evaluating Infermedica’s solutions, and if you’re interested in discussing our clinical validation procedures, feel free to reach out to me.
BL/EN/2026/06/29
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