The App That Promised an NHS ‘Revolution’ Then Went Down in Flames
The Sunday Times charts the rise and fall of Babylon Health, a U.K. tech startup that won NHS contracts with the support of the then Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, but ultimately crumbled due to overblown claims about its AI technology. Here’s an excerpt:
Babylon Health, a tech start-up championed by Matt Hancock and advised by Dominic Cummings, promised that its AI chatbot could keep patients who didn’t need to be seen by a health professional out of the overstretched NHS.
But the technology was not as sophisticated as the company claimed, with former staff now claiming that what began as a crude tool based on “decision trees written by doctors, put into an Excel spreadsheet” never realised its promised potential. Concerns – including the fact the app missed clear signs of a heart attack or dangerous blood clots – were raised with regulators, which failed to intervene or lacked powers to do so.
Babylon’s deals with the NHS, which saw it receive at least £22 million over the past three years alone and helped it to woo investors, were in part due its links with the Conservative Party and the backing of Hancock, the Health Secretary from 2018 to 2021.
The Tories received more than £250,000 in donations from individuals and companies with stakes in Babylon Healthcare, including Hancock, whose failed Tory leadership bid in 2019 received £10,000.
Between 2015 and 2022 the company’s executives had 17 separate meetings with a total of 19 ministers, including Prime Ministers Theresa May and Boris Johnson, and Philip Hammond and Liz Truss during their time at the Treasury.
The promise of Babylon’s founder, Ali Parsa, to “revolutionise healthcare” was an intoxicating one. Holding forth to a rapt audience at the Royal College of Physicians, a 1970s concrete block near Regent’s Park, in Central London, he explained that his health-care start-up had developed an AI-based system, a “doctor in your pocket”, that was, he said, better than the real thing. …
Babylon, he said, was building a super-powered machine to diagnose conditions, manage health and suggest treatments for billions of people. Investors and influential names in and around the Conservative Party lapped it up. Between its founding in 2013 and its 2021 stock market float in New York, the company raised $1.2 billion, making it one of the most lavishly funded medical start-ups in the world. By comparison, Theranos, the fraudulent Silicon Valley blood-test firm founded by Elizabeth Holmes, raised $700 million. …
What has unfolded in the years since for Parsa, the company he started and his former Government cheerleader, Hancock, is a reversal of cinematic proportions. Hancock, who resigned as Health Secretary over an affair with his aide, Gina Coladangelo, now spends his days eating worms and getting punched in the face by footballers as a reality-TV contestant. Babylon, once valued at $4.2 billion, collapsed into administration in August.
Its British assets were sold for just £500,000 to a little-known U.S. rival, which picked up a ragbag of other assets sold for another £6.3 million. The U.S. operation has been put into a court-supervised liquidation. Parsa, once the standard-bearer for start-up Britain, moved to the U.S. and has disappeared from view; most of his £825 million fortune has evaporated.
Worth reading in full.
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Would be mighty interested to know who picked up the assets – and, presumably, access to the patient data accumulated – at such knockdown prices.
And to see where the charismatic Mr Parsa pops up next.
But could it rival evenBlair’s digital health patient fiasco?
cost a cool 10 billion.
For, err, nothing.
I am sure that “mistakes were made” and that doubtless “lessons will be learned”.
Have faith.
/sarc
And many absconded with their criminal millions inclusing Parsa I would assume.
Another scam. But as PT Barnum knew, idiots are created every minute. Especially those in gov’t or Pharma-ment.
“…..had developed an AI-based system, a “doctor in your pocket”, that was, he said, better than the real thing. …” But Babylon Healthcare must have been truly awful not to have got anywhere this low bar.
“The App That Promised an NHS ‘Revolution’ Then Went Down in Flames”
….taking with it millions of pounds of taxpayers money.
The Public Sector does like a bit of ‘snake oil’, and the odd ‘chancer’, especially a non-white. Committee decision making and a lack of clear responsibility seems to be the key.
Allied to diversity, equality and inclusivity
£22million down the drain?
Peanuts …. £37 billion pissed away on Track n Trace
https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accounts-committee/news/150988/unimaginable-cost-of-test-trace-failed-to-deliver-central-promise-of-averting-another-lockdown/
Its the one spec of light, in that the Government and the establishment are so inept that any digital currency, or social credit system is bound to be an abject failure, but of course we the tax payer will pick up the cheque for their repeated incompetence.
Oh! but lessons have been learnt!🤣
I am afraid the term Artificial Intelligence is yet another buzz phrase adopted by the advertising industry to mislead people into buying stuff.
And adopted by governments to mislead people.
So often intelligence is misunderstood as wisdom. How often do we hear tales of very intelligent people lacking common sense or perspective?
Artificial Intelligence is a single minded pursuit of a goal, and inevitably biased by the prejudices of its authors and limited by its sensory input devices..
Wisdom is a distillation of human experience and interactions – verbal and physical.
A medical diagnostic machine, as the article pointed out, is a development of a decision tree. It will however not have empathy, which is one of the qualities that distinguishes a good doctor from an average one. It is necessary to ask not only the right question but to ask it in the right way to get to the real cause of a problem. It is an innate human quality that cannot be replicated or even simulated by a machine.
And the possibility of vaccine injury would be omitted from the options in the decision tree, in all probability.
In this context, it’s worth looking at Malcolm Kedrick’s two most recent postings, at https://drmalcolmkendrick.org. Dr Kendrick explains how your typical GP consultation has now been reduced to a series of tick-box tasks and mandatory training courses that inevitably prevent the GPs from actually developing any genuine empathy with the patients sitting in front of them. It’s pretty much a human equivalent of the Babylon Health approach.
Well, what a good way to make GP consultations indistinguishable from “AI”(and equally limited).
British crony capitalism at its finest.
Isn’t this essentially what NHS 111 does? It’s all agorithm-based as far as I know. However it seems to have the opposite problem in that it wants you to call an ambulance if you’ve stubbed your big toe.