In late 2016, Hugh Harvey was working as a consultant doctor in the UK's National Health Service. Harvey had dabbled in machine learning while doing a research degree, and had seen the potential for artificial intelligence to revolutionize health care. But he felt strongly that the introduction of AI into medicine was not going to come from within the NHS--it was going to come from industry. So when an opportunity opened up at a buzzy new health-tech startup, Babylon Health, he applied. Founded in London in 2013 by Ali Parsa, a British-Iranian ex-banker, Babylon had a lofty goal: It wanted to do with health care what Google did with information; that is, make it freely and easily available to everyone.

The news: An international consortium of medical experts has introduced the first official standards for clinical trials that involve artificial intelligence. The move comes at a time when hype around medical AI is at a peak, with inflated and unverified claims about the effectiveness of certain tools threatening to undermine people's trust in AI overall. What it means: Announced in Nature Medicine, the British Medical Journal, and the Lancet, the new standards extend two sets of guidelines around how clinical trials are conducted and reported that are already used around the world for drug development, diagnostic tests, and other medical interventions. AI researchers will now have to describe the skills needed to use an AI tool, the setting in which the AI is evaluated, details about how humans interact with the AI, the analysis of error cases, and more. Why it matters: Randomized controlled trials are the most trustworthy way to demonstrate the effectiveness and safety of a treatment or clinical technique.

From the beginning of the 2010s, big data and AI have been trending up to unleash revolutionary changes in many industries. Universities have set up data science programs and investors are pouring tons of dollars into AI-related startups. The US and China have long been the focus of AI development as these two countries have the most AI unicorns and investment activities. Among the top 20 most valuable AI unicorns, the US takes 9 and China takes 7 while the UK and Japan take 3 and 1 respectively. While the US and China outshine the rest in a global scale, the UK is the supernova in Europe, acting as the womb of the most regional AI startups.

AI healthcare startup Babylon Health believes it can appropriately triage patients in 85 percent of cases. Babylon Health is best known for GP at Hand, a service which is supported by UK health secretary Matt Hancock and integrated into Samsung Health. GP at Hand links patients with health experts 24/7 using video calls and can facilitate any prescriptions to be sent to local pharmacies. The service, however, has been criticised for an AI chatbot which repeatedly gave unsafe advice and for only taking on healthier, often younger individuals while redirecting cash away from local surgeries relied on by older and sicker patients. Correct triaging is essential to ensure patients receive the appropriate care.

When Ada Health was founded nine years ago, hardly anyone was talking about combining artificial intelligence and physician care -- outside of a handful of futurists. But the chatbot boom gave way to a powerful combination of AI-augmented health care which others, like Babylon Health in 2013 and KRY in 2015, also capitalized on. The journey Ada was about to take was not an obvious one, so I spoke to Dr. Claire Novorol, Ada's co-founder and chief medical officer, at the Slush conference last year to unpack their process and strategy. Co-founded with Daniel Nathrath and Dr. Martin Hirsch, the startup initially set out to be an assistant to doctors rather than something that would have a consumer interface. At the beginning, Novorol said they did not talk about what they were building as an AI so much as it was pure machine learning. Years later, Ada is a free app, and just like the average chatbot, it asks a series of questions and employs an algorithm to make an initial health assessment.

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.

From the beginning of the 2010s, big data and AI have been trending up to unleash revolutionary changes in many industries. Universities have set up data science programs and investors are pouring tons of dollars into AI-related startups. The US and China have long been the focus of AI development as these two countries have the most AI unicorns and investment activities. Among the top 20 most valuable AI unicorns, the US takes 9 and China takes 7 while the UK and Japan take 3 and 1 respectively. While the US and China outshine the rest in a global scale, the UK is the supernova in Europe, acting as the womb of the most regional AI startups.

While the default in amateur diagnostics has become a quick Google search, increasingly innovators are looking to curb potential health misinformation pitfalls. New research published last week by JAMA found that Buoy Health's free chatbot helped decrease the rate of uncertainty among patients. The study also found that patients using the platform were more likely to decrease their intended level of care after using the technology. "We're excited to have our results published -- clearing patient confusion and reducing unnecessary ER/urgent care visits have big implications as healthcare costs continue to rise," Dr. Andrew Le, CEO and cofounder of Buoy Health told MobiHealthNews in an email. "That said, we will be working on follow-on studies, always focused on proving our outcomes and safety. We believe in peer-reviewed science and will continue to pursue transparency."

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?

Dmitry Kaminskiy speaks as though he were trying to unload everything he knows about the science and economics of longevity--from senolytics research that seeks to stop aging cells from spewing inflammatory proteins and other molecules to the trillion-dollar life extension industry that he and his colleagues are trying to foster--in one sitting. At the heart of the discussion with Singularity Hub is the idea that artificial intelligence will be the engine that drives breakthroughs in how we approach healthcare and healthy aging--a concept with little traction even just five years ago. "At that time, it was considered too futuristic that artificial intelligence and data science … might be more accurate compared to any hypothesis of human doctors," said Kaminskiy, co-founder and managing partner at Deep Knowledge Ventures, an investment firm that is betting big on AI and longevity. Artificial intelligence in healthcare is attracting more investments and deals than just about any sector of the economy, according to data research firm CB Insights. In the most recent third quarter, AI healthcare startups raised nearly $1.6 billion, buoyed by a $550 million mega-round from London-based Babylon Health, which uses AI to collect data from patients, analyze the information, find comparable matches, then make recommendations.