When Covid hit, the UK’s National Health Service was faced with an unprecedented operational challenge. The exponential pace of the virus meant that they needed system-wide intelligence in real-time on where the pandemic was going to flare up next, and a way to rapidly turn that intelligence into action. They turned to a machine-learning based operational intelligence solution. However, getting hospital operators and healthcare system planners to understand and trust a sophisticated machine-learning system is by no means guaranteed. In this talk, I will discuss the technical solutions we developed to address this challenge.