Babylon Healthcare Services, the fast-growing mobile medical consultation service, says its artificial intelligence software, in tests, can assess common conditions more accurately than human doctors.
London-based Babylon said last week its AI correctly answered 81 percent of diagnostic questions designed to mimic those trainee doctors must answer as part of the Royal College of General Practitioner’s exam that must be passed to become a qualified GP doctor in the U.K. The exam is graded on a curve, but over the past five years, the average score trainees needed to pass was 72 percent.
But Martin Marshall, vice chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners, which administers the exam Babylon’s AI sought to benchmark itself against, said that software should never be compared to the abilities of human doctors.
“No app or algorithm will ever be able to do what a GP does,” Marshall said in a statement. “Much of what a GP does is based on a trusting relationship between a patient and a doctor and research has shown that GPs have a ‘gut feeling’ when they just know something is wrong with a patient.”
It’s not the first time Babylon has tangled with the RCGP either. The professional body has criticized the U.K. National Health Service for letting patients choose Babylon’s “GP in Hand” mobile consultation service as their official primary care provider. It’s also attacked Babylon for paying doctors who do consultations through its app too much money, making it more difficult for local NHS offices to find doctors to cover shifts.
Babylon demonstrated its AI technology publicly for the first time an event at London’s Royal College of Physicians, and said the company would publish the results of its tests online. It’s made the tool available for free through its app and website in some parts of the U.K., including London, as well as Rwanda, although because the technology has not been approved by regulators, Babylon calls the software’s answers “health information” not “diagnoses.”
In addition to Babylon, others racing to create general diagnostic software include Ada, a startup with offices in Berlin and London that has launched a similar symptom-checker app to Babylon, HealthTap, in Palo Alto, Calif., Your.MD, a health information app created by British medical publisher BMJ, and IBM Corp.
So far, AI companies’ efforts to change health care have not always been smooth. IBM’s Watson Health business has been criticized for falling short of promises that its system could help doctors select the best available cancer treatments for a given patient. Meanwhile, British regulators faulted a London hospital for transferring millions of patient records to Alphabet Inc.’s DeepMind.
Malcolm Grant, chairman of NHS England, took part in a panel discussion during the launch event Babylon held to announce the AI test results Wednesday. He said Babylon’s “GP at Hand” model was “interesting,” but also sounded a note of caution. “The NHS has enormous intellectual capital and I want to be very clear about not driving that away,” Grant said. “I want to be very clear that we will not drive GPs out of practice and see this as an Uber-style rival.”