Unraveling Babylon Health's Challenges in the AI Health Care Industry

Founded by Ali Parsa in 2013, Babylon Health was born in London with a mission to revolutionise healthcare, making it as accessible as Google did with information. When industry expert Hugh Harvey joined the team in 2016, the company had attracted significant venture capital, signalling its promise beyond its primary service—a straightforward doctor consultation app via video. The real game-changer for Babylon Health was in the pipeline: an AI-based symptom checker designed to drastically improve the speed and accuracy of diagnoses.

Harvey scrutinised the technology that was generating excitement in the industry and found it to be a set of Excel spreadsheets that detailed clinical decision-making processes. Developed by the company's junior medical staff, these spreadsheets divided the human body into sections and created a system where the app would use 'clinical flows'—or decision trees—to guide diagnoses based on the symptoms and body parts users reported. While this approach was inventive, Harvey determined that it fell short of what's generally accepted as true artificial intelligence in the healthcare sector.

In the years following its launch, Babylon Health garnered significant attention, securing NHS contracts and forming alliances with British health insurers. The company broadened its reach, inking a deal with Tencent for service provision via WeChat and receiving a $550 million investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Despite a strong public market debut in 2021 at a $4.2 billion valuation, Babylon faced financial challenges. The pursuit of rapid expansion led to increased losses, and the company's stock value declined. By mid-August, financial pressures forced the UK branch into administration, a situation akin to US bankruptcy protection, resulting in the shutdown of its US office, employee layoffs, and a bankruptcy filing stateside.

Former staff recounted that Babylon Health's founder, Ali Parsa, was fixated on implementing rapid growth throughout the company however, this aggressive expansion strategy led to indiscriminate hiring and redundant work as teams often tackled similar projects. According to these insiders, the company's development pace couldn't match its ambition, struggling to deliver polished products.

After Harvey's arrival, he was told of a developing knowledge graph—an advanced system meant to link pieces of medical information with probability-based relationships. In practice, this entailed Harvey and fellow clinicians processing a multitude of medical probability queries. The complexity of these questions escalated, but the relevance and sophistication did not, leaving the company's claims of utilising actual AI in question. An ex-AI team member suggested that Harvey might have been shown simplified Excel models for convenience, though conceding the underlying technology was not particularly advanced.

In 2017, Babylon introduced GP at Hand, an app designed to alleviate the NHS's lengthy waiting lists by automating certain patient inquiries. To showcase its technology, Babylon Health scheduled a visit from the BBC to its office. However, the app they intended to present had not been finished. The app was hastily modelled for gastroenterology and lacked a proper interface. Data scientists worked tirelessly, even sleeping in the office, to create a mock-up of an app that appeared functional. This incident highlighted the pressure to demonstrate progress without delivering a fully developed product.

In a statement, Babylon Health boasted that its AI surpassed human doctors in diagnostic examinations, a claim met with scepticism by medical professionals. Despite the controversy, the company’s GP at Hand app gained traction, though not without facing critique from the medical community. Dr David Watkins, an NHS consultant oncologist, was among the first to critique the AI’s reliability, highlighting its diagnostic inaccuracies publicly on his Twitter account. His concerns echoed those within the company and resonated with the UK's medical regulator.

The Care Quality Commission, England’s health and social care services watchdog, raised doubts in a 2017 report about the safety and efficacy of Babylon’s services, sparking a legal threat from the company. In 2019, reports surfaced of Babylon’s service costing the NHS millions, and in 2020, the company conceded to a significant data breach within its GP at Hand app, exposing patient consultations. Despite national adoption, financial viability in the UK remained elusive, leading to Babylon’s exit from its final NHS contract.