The Sunday Times charts the rise and fall of Babylon Health, a U.K. tech startup that won NHS contracts with the support of the then Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, but ultimately crumbled due to overblown claims about its AI technology. Here’s an excerpt:
Babylon Health, a tech start-up championed by Matt Hancock and advised by Dominic Cummings, promised that its AI chatbot could keep patients who didn’t need to be seen by a health professional out of the overstretched NHS.
But the technology was not as sophisticated as the company claimed, with former staff now claiming that what began as a crude tool based on “decision trees written by doctors, put into an Excel spreadsheet” never realised its promised potential. Concerns – including the fact the app missed clear signs of a heart attack or dangerous blood clots – were raised with regulators, which failed to intervene or lacked powers to do so.
Babylon’s deals with the NHS, which saw it receive at least £22 million over the past three years alone and helped it to woo investors, were in part due its links with the Conservative Party and the backing of Hancock, the Health Secretary from 2018 to 2021.
The Tories received more than £250,000 in donations from individuals and companies with stakes in Babylon Healthcare, including Hancock, whose failed Tory leadership bid in 2019 received £10,000.
Between 2015 and 2022 the company’s executives had 17 separate meetings with a total of 19 ministers, including Prime Ministers Theresa May and Boris Johnson, and Philip Hammond and Liz Truss during their time at the Treasury.
The promise of Babylon’s founder, Ali Parsa, to “revolutionise healthcare” was an intoxicating one. Holding forth to a rapt audience at the Royal College of Physicians, a 1970s concrete block near Regent’s Park, in Central London, he explained that his health-care start-up had developed an AI-based system, a “doctor in your pocket”, that was, he said, better than the real thing. …
Babylon, he said, was building a super-powered machine to diagnose conditions, manage health and suggest treatments for billions of people. Investors and influential names in and around the Conservative Party lapped it up. Between its founding in 2013 and its 2021 stock market float in New York, the company raised $1.2 billion, making it one of the most lavishly funded medical start-ups in the world. By comparison, Theranos, the fraudulent Silicon Valley blood-test firm founded by Elizabeth Holmes, raised $700 million. …
What has unfolded in the years since for Parsa, the company he started and his former Government cheerleader, Hancock, is a reversal of cinematic proportions. Hancock, who resigned as Health Secretary over an affair with his aide, Gina Coladangelo, now spends his days eating worms and getting punched in the face by footballers as a reality-TV contestant. Babylon, once valued at $4.2 billion, collapsed into administration in August.
Its British assets were sold for just £500,000 to a little-known U.S. rival, which picked up a ragbag of other assets sold for another £6.3 million. The U.S. operation has been put into a court-supervised liquidation. Parsa, once the standard-bearer for start-up Britain, moved to the U.S. and has disappeared from view; most of his £825 million fortune has evaporated.
Worth reading in full.
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