One doctor's experience inside Babylon Health

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 3 November 2023

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Hugh Harvey, managing director of consultancy Hardian Health, to talk about his time at Babylon Health (4:30), his first look at the company’s “artificial intelligence” (7:00), why it’s hard to build a medical chatbot (11:30), the siloed nature of the company (14:30), its regulatory loophole (16:20), Ali Parsa’s obsession with creating an “AlphaGo moment" (21:10), the gong (24:15), how the company became more brazen with its marketing (27:10), why getting chatbots certified as medical devices is so hard (29:45), and why the Silicon Valley way often doesn't work in medicine (33:00).

Link to The Sunday Times' investigation: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/rise-and-fall-of-babylon-healthcare-the-doctor-in-your-pocket-3p6q6jjfx

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Yo! Technology! What is it all about?
0:04.6	They show a recorded video call between a doctor and a patient,
0:08.4	and they show AI apparently analysing the patient's emotions.
0:13.1	It's a woman, the patient's analyzing her emotions,
0:16.0	coming up with data, coming up with prompts in real time on a dashboard.
0:20.4	And I knew then that that was a lie
0:22.5	because Ali said this was a real consultation and I knew that was a lie because I knew both the people in the video they were both Babylon employees
0:31.5	and I knew from the grapevine and my contacts that this was all vaporware it was something that was
0:37.1	completely mocked up as a demo
0:38.3	hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley how's everybody everybody doing this week? We have a bit of a change of pace.
0:59.8	So readers of the Sunday Times may have seen last week that we published a big investigation into Babylon Healthcare, the AI chat bot startup that raised more than $1.2 billion with a B.
1:14.9	It was valued briefly at $4 billion.
1:17.7	It was celebrated by former health secretary, Matt Hancock, signed several NHS contracts.
1:23.4	It was a very big deal.
1:25.6	And then it all went pear shape.
1:26.9	The company went bankrupt in August and
1:29.1	amazingly sold its UK arm for just 500,000 pounds and sold a bunch of its other assets for around
1:36.4	6 million pounds. So just a pittance. Now, companies fail all the time. That's actually the business
1:42.9	model of Silicon Valley. You find a bunch of companies taking very big swings, and if one of them makes it big, everyone involved may get super wealthy and it all works out. So a company failing in and of itself is not that interesting. But what piqued my interest here was just the sheer scale of Babylon's rise and fall.
2:03.8	So, you know, really how did it turn $1.2 billion into less than $10 million?
2:10.0	And at the center of this is the CEO and founder, Ali Parza.
2:14.2	So anyway, a couple months ago, I just started kind of digging around to see what I could come up with.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Will Morley, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Will Morley and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.