After announcing a $550 million fundraise last August, U.K. AI-based health services startup Babylon Health is putting some of that money to use with its widest-ranging project to date. The company has inked a 10-year deal with the city of Wolverhampton in England to provide an integrated health app covering 300,000 people, the entire population of the city.
The financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but Babylon confirmed that the NHS is not taking a stake in the startup as part of it. The plan is to start rolling out the first phase of the app by the end of this year.
Babylon Health is known for building AI-based platforms that help diagnose patients’ issues. Babylon’s services are provided as a complement to seeing actual clinicians — the idea being that the interactions and AI can speed up some of the work of getting people seen and into the system. Some of Babylon’s best known work to date has been a chatbot that it built for the NHS in the U.K., and, in addition to working with a number of private businesses on their employee healthcare services, it is also now in the process of rolling out services in 11 countries in Asia. (In August, Babylon said it was delivering 4,000 clinical consultations each day, or one patient interaction every 10 seconds; covering 4.3 million people worldwide; with more than 1.2 million digital consultations completed to date.)
Even with all these milestones passed — milestones that have helped catapult Babylon to a $2 billion valuation — its latest project will be its most ambitious to date: it will be the first time that Babylon works on a project that combines both hospital and primary medical care into an all-in-one app.
“We are extremely proud of this exciting 10-year partnership with RWT which will benefit patients and the NHS as a whole,” said Ali Parsa, CEO and founder of Babylon, in a statement. “We have over 1,000 AI experts, clinicians, engineers and scientists who will be helping to make Digital-First Integrated Care a reality and provide fast, effective, proactive care to patients. Together with RWT, we can demonstrate this works and help the NHS lead healthcare across the world.”
The plan is for Babylon and the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust — the local health authority and body that will oversee the work for the city’s population — to build an app that will not only provide remote diagnoses, but also live monitoring of patients with chronic conditions (using wearables and other monitoring apps) and the ability to connect people with doctors and others remotely.
Other services will include the ability to let patients access their own medical records and review their own consultations; book appointments; renew prescriptions; view a “digital twin” of their own state of health based on medical history and other details; and manage their rehab after a procedure, illness or injury.
The gap in the market that Babylon is tackling is the fact that many countries are seeing populations that are both growing bigger and generally living longer, and that is putting a strain not just on public health services, but also those that are managed completely or partly privately. This has been a particularly painful theme in Babylon’s home market, the U.K., where healthcare is nationalised and is regularly facing budgetary and human capital shortages, but there is no infrastructure (or consumer finance) to supplement that for the majority of people.
The aim, however, goes beyond simply filling NHS gaps; it’s also about trying to build services that fit better with how people live, for example to provide them with certain services at home to save them from coming into, say, a hospital to be treated if the condition merits it.
“We know from our active engagement with patients of all ages and backgrounds that they are keen to use technology that will improve access and give them greater control of their own health, wellbeing and social inclusion,” said Trust Chief Executive David Loughton, CBE, in a statement. “For example, it should be normal for a patient with a long-term condition to take a blood-test at home, have the results fed into their app which alerts the specialist if they need an appointment. The patient chooses a time to meet, has the consultation through the app, works with their specialist to build a care plan, and the app encourages them to complete it whilst assessing the impact it’s having. This is our vision for properly joined-up and integrated care.”
AI has become a major theme in the drive to improve healthcare and medicine overall, primarily through two main areas: providing diagnostic and other services to patients in situations, acting in roles that would otherwise be played by humans; and in research, acting as a “super brain” to help perform complex calculations in the quest for better drug discovery, disease pathology and other areas that would take humans far longer to do on their own.
Well aware of the strains on health systems, startups, investors and other stakeholders have jumped into using AI in the hopes of creating more efficiency and potentially better outcomes. But that doesn’t mean that all the outcomes have actually been better. Google’s DeepMind encountered a lot of controversy around how it handled patient data in its own NHS deals, leading to questions and investigations that have now stretched into years. And BenevolentAI — which has been working on drug discovery — found itself raising money last year in round that devalued the loss-making company by half.
Paul Bate, Babylon’s MD of NHS services, noted in an interview that Babylon is mindful of patient privacy and consent, and notes that the service is opt-in and transparent in its data usage when engaging users. He declined to comment on how and when data will be retained by the NHS or by Babylon (or both) but said it would be made clear in the app when it is launched.
“It’s not a simple answer to say whether one body or another will keep it, but it will be transparent, both for US and the NHS, when it launches,” he added.
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