By Cain O’Mahony
The collapse of Babylon Health will be greeted with a cry of ‘good riddance’ from the labour movement and health campaigners. It has been a dangerous example of what private sector vultures can do to the NHS.
At its height Babylon Health was worth $4.2bn. This summer it collapsed with only $25mn in its account after people saw through this digital version of snake-oil salesmanship. But not before it had fleeced over £22mn from the NHS and left a trail of financial havoc, and all with the repeated adoration of consecutive Tory Ministers.
The company’s founder was Ali Parsa, a former Goldman Sachs banker. His first raid into the NHS was with his first company, Circle Health, which was the first private company to run a NHS hospital – the Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Cambridge. This subsequently ended up with a £5mn loss, and the Care & Quality Commission awarding the hospital its worst ever rating for caring.
After that disaster, you’d have thought Parsa would have been chased down the street by angry government ministers. Far from it. He now charmed them with his new venture, Babylon Health, which would bring telemedicine and Artificial Intelligence with online and video consultations, to solve the crisis of waiting lists at GP practices.
Thousands de-registered from local GPs without their knowledge
In all, between 2015 and 2022 he had a total of 22 high level meetings with Tory Ministers, from Health Secretaries to Prime Ministers. Easing the path to Number Ten was one of Babylon’s consultants, a certain Dominic Cummings.
High profile Tories gave backing to his next venture, the ‘GP on Hand’app – it fitted perfectly to the Tories’ philosophy of a ‘quick fix for a fast buck’.
The ‘GP on Hand’app was launched in 2016, when Babylon began working with a GP practice in Fulham. Changes to NHS structures meant that people were now allowed to register at a GP outside the area where they live.
For the young generation on the move, this new app seemed the easy way to get a doctor’s appointment. But very few realised that by signing up to the ‘GP on Hand’ app, it immediately deregistered them from their local GP – over 48,000 registered with the App (and therefore the small Fulham GP Practice) of whom only 10 per cent lived in Fulham.
This caused funding chaos for the NHS authority for the area, the Hammersmith & Fulham Clinical Commissioning Group. At that time, GPs received a yearly NHS payment via their CCG for every patient they had registered to their practice (an average of around £152 per patient).
Hammersmith & Fulham CCG had to pay up front for this sudden huge upsurge of ‘GP on Hand’ patients, and then faced a deficit of over £31mn. Meanwhile, those GP Practices who lost patients to ‘GP on Hand’ faced a huge loss in their yearly NHS payment.
British Medical Association expressed their concerns
The financial turmoil aside, the British Medical Association were amongst many bodies concerned that this new online service was letting the private sector skim off healthier young patients with short-term care needs, while leaving other parts of the NHS – funded by us, the taxpayer – with a heavier financial burden looking after the more vulnerable with long-term health needs.
Andy Slaughter, the Labour MP for Hammersmith and Shepherds Bush, began campaigning against Babylon and the disruption it was causing to the NHS Primary Care Market, and the campaign moved to the West Midlands, after it was discovered that Babylon had signed ten-year deals with University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Trust and the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, with little consultation with either Clinical Commissioning Groups in the West Midlands or local GPs.
Local Labour Party branches began passing resolutions against Babylon and speaking at health groups about the threat, but everything came to a halt when the pandemic hit.
Then, during the pandemic, people began to realise that Babylon could not live up to its promises. Ironically their gamble to skim off young, healthy ‘patients’ backfired. The app’s ease of access meant that Babylon ended up with far more patients than it could cope with. As a former employee told the Sunday Times (29 October, 2023): “What a surprise, all the 20 year olds with anxiety from TikTok are just booking appointments all the time…”
Babylon ‘AI’ was an Excel spreadsheet
Babylon made great pitches that its stride forwards in AI medical diagnosis meant it would be able to cope with the upsurge. Yet their ‘AI’ was nothing of the league of the ‘neural networks’ being developed by Silicon Valley. One former employee described their crude tool as: “…decision trees written by doctors, put into an Excel spreadsheet” (Sunday Times, 29 October 2023).
This was a danger to patients, with the system even missing clear signs of heart attacks and blood clots. Fortunately, by last year contracts with the NHS were cancelled, but around £22mn has been wasted.
Babylon cut and ran, all the way to the USA. But despite huge investments, all the failures and issues were just writ larger, and investors pulled out and Babylon collapsed.
The Babylon experience is an important lesson for a future Labour government, particularly as our leadership talk loudly, but vaguely, about the need for ‘reform’ in health care. Yes, telemedicine and AI have enormously important roles to play in health care, as was shown by the pandemic. But they must be thoroughly tried and tested, heavily regulated and monitored, and above all be under the control of the NHS, and not by fly-by-night snake-oil salesmen.
