Targeting everyday decision makers in research: early career researcher and patient and public involvement and engagement collaboration in an AI-in-healthcare project

Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE) is critical in the development and application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare research to ensure that outcomes align with patients' and the public's needs. However, current PPIE practices often limit involvement to reactive tasks such as reviewing documents and providing plain English summaries. Whilst important, this approach can sideline PPIE from influencing key research decisions. Consequently, PPIE interactions often fail to adequately reach and influence everyday decision makers. On AI and big data research projects, these decisions are often made by Early Career Researchers (ECRs) who play a vital role in the day-to-day research process. After realising these limitations, and to address them, the NIHR-funded AI MULTIPLY consortium introduced twice-monthly "ECRs meet PPIE" sessions. These sessions began in May 2024 and enabled ECRs to present and discuss work in progress and gain targeted input from PPIE members during early phases of research, such as research direction, data and variable selection. By integrating PPIE at this stage, the project aimed to improve the relevance and impact of the healthcare research but also provide ECRs with essential skills in public engagement. At time of writing, 12 sessions have been conducted. Through ethnographic observations integrated with internal surveys, the findings show how the sessions were developed, overcame challenges, and helped to embed PPIE contributors' voices into an AI-in-healthcare project. Based on our findings we have identified 5 recommendations for other large interdisciplinary consortia to strengthen the contribution of PPIE to everyday decision-making in research.