Medical Advice From a Bot: The Unproven Promise of Babylon Health

Hamish Fraser first encountered Babylon Health in 2017 when he and a colleague helped test the accuracy of several artificial intelligence-powered symptom checkers, meant to offer medical advice for anyone with a smartphone, for Wired U.K. Among the competitors, Babylon's symptom checker performed worst in identifying common illnesses, including asthma and shingles. Fraser, then a health informatics expert at the University of Leeds in England, figured that the company would need to vastly improve to stick around. "At that point I had no prejudice or knowledge of any of them, so I had no axe to grind, and I thought'Oh that's not really good,'" says Fraser, now at Brown University. "I thought they would disappear, right? Much has changed since the Wired U.K. article came out. Since early 2018, the London-based Babylon Health has grown from just 300 employees to approximately 1,500. The company has a valuation of more than $2 billion and says it wants to "put an affordable and accessible health service in the hands of every person on earth." In England, Babylon operates the fifth-largest practice under the country's mostly government-funded National Health Service, allowing patients near London and Birmingham to video chat with doctors or be seen in a clinic if necessary. The company claims to have processed 700,000 digital consultations between patients and physicians, with plans to offer services in other U.K. cities in the future. "I thought they would disappear, right?