Babylon Health's software, pushed on millions of NHS patients as an alternative to calling the doctor's office, has a record of complaints about its chatbot and questions around its AI claims
broad concerns that the companyThere’s a problem with that claim, says Hamish Fraser, a Brown University biomedical informatics professor who disputed Babylon’s assertions in aBritain’s premier medical journal. He points out that Babylon’s software had answered only 15 of the 50 exam problems and was allowed to give three answers to each question. “When doctors do this test, you get one right answer,” he says.
There are some doubts, for instance, about whether the software can fulfill one of its main aims: keeping the “worried well” from heading to the hospital. Early and current iterations of the chatbot advise users to go for a costly emergency room visit in around 30% of cases, according to a Babylon staffer, compared with roughly 20% of people who dial the national health advice line, 111. It’s not clear how many patients take that advice, and Babylon says it doesn’t track that data.
All of this has played out behind the scenes while Babylon was successfully marketing itself as a digital salve for overstretched healthcare systems. One of the company’s biggest fans is Britain’s health secretary, Matt Hancock, who said in a recent newspaper supplement that was sponsored by Babylon that he has “become known for using this GP at Hand app.”
Software is developed by iteration. Developers build an app and release it into the wild, testing it on various groups of live users and iterating as they go along. Silicon Valley’s mentality, once espoused by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, is to “move fast and break things.” But developing new drugs or medical devices requires a more deliberate approach, since human lives hang in the balance.
Despite the wariness of some doctors, Parsa is much admired by London’s tech community for his tenacity and grand vision to bring “accessible and affordable health service into the hands of every person on earth.” For many, it’s a refreshing dose of entrepreneurial grandeur that you don’t always find in modest Britain. Parsa’s story is an inspiring one. He
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