The ELSA Way is built on FUTURE-AI, an international consensus guideline for trustworthy AI in healthcare published in the BMJ in 2025 Lekadir et al. (2025). A consortium of 117 experts from 50 countries agreed on 30 recommendations, grouped under six principles whose initials spell the name: fairness, universality, traceability, usability, robustness and explainability, plus seven general recommendations.
We chose FUTURE-AI for four reasons. It reflects broad international agreement rather than one organisation or country. It covers the whole lifecycle, including the deployment work that technical guidelines often skip. It rates each recommendation separately for research prototypes and for tools meant for routine care, so you can see what applies to your stage. And it works alongside reporting guidelines such as TRIPOD+AI Collins et al. (2024) and CLAIM Mongan et al. (2020): those tell you what to report about a study, FUTURE-AI tells you what to do while you build the tool, and its documentation recommendation (T2) points you to the reporting guidelines.
The FUTURE-AI principles section has a page for each principle. The FUTURE-AI overview lists all 30 recommendations with their compliance levels and the chapter that covers each one.
- Lekadir, K., Frangi, A. F., Porras, A. R., & others. (2025). FUTURE-AI: international consensus guideline for trustworthy and deployable artificial intelligence in healthcare. BMJ, 388, e081554. 10.1136/bmj-2024-081554
- Collins, G. S., Dhiman, P., & others. (2024). TRIPOD+AI statement: updated guidance for reporting clinical prediction models that use regression or machine learning methods. BMJ. 10.1136/bmj-2023-078378
- Mongan, J., Moy, L., & Kahn, C. E. (2020). Checklist for Artificial Intelligence in Medical Imaging (CLAIM): a guide for authors and reviewers. Radiology: Artificial Intelligence, 2(2), e200029. 10.1148/ryai.2020200029