Babylon, a world leading digital-first, value-based care company today announced a collaboration to explore opportunities to improve the accessibility, affordability and quality of healthcare for people across the world by using their combined AI, Machine Learning and Cloud technologies. The new collaboration has the aim of exploring opportunities to accelerate and enhance current AI and Machine Learning, utilizing them to shift the focus from sick care to preventative health care. "Babylon and Microsoft working together shows our combined commitment to build on our leading-edge digital health technologies and deliver better access and greater affordability for health systems and patients alike", said Ali Parsa, Chief Executive Officer, Babylon. "We share the same vision of healthcare and believe that by bringing our assets together we can further the digital health revolution, offer immediate access to all-in-one personalized care and we can enhance the consumer experience, improve patient outcomes and reduce overall costs." As part of this relationship, the two organizations will explore opportunities to innovate and deliver across product, cloud and AI research with the view toward increasing the impact of their complementary healthcare technologies and extending the Babylon healthcare platform.

This virus has held global healthcare delivery at a standstill for over 18 months, despite the promising vaccine roll-out. The U.S. "passed the hospital breaking point" in December, as a headline in The Atlantic put it. Rochelle Walensky of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned that a recent increase in coronavirus cases could herald a "fourth surge." If we do not act quickly to resolve the situation, the result could be thousands of untimely deaths. In just one example, clinicians around the world are using artificial intelligence auto-contouring tech to automate and optimize the time-consuming task of pinpointing organs at risk.