4 ms·

The fact that that company even made it so far is quite of a mystery to me. The tech stack, the complete lack of understanding of how things worked in the real

The fact that that company even made it so far is quite of a mystery to me. The tech stack, the complete lack of understanding of how things worked in the real world, the occasional illiterate product manager, and many many other things made me quickly understand that it will go belly up in a couple of years. Fast forward to today and i was absolutely right.

vidarh 3y ago
It's such a shame. From a user point of view they were great. I'm registered with them. The UK GP practice has been taken over by someone else (eMed) The app was great. I got appointments fast until very recently. The triage was basic, though, but to an end-user it wouldn't have been obvious to what extent their business plan relied on that for the shot at future profitability. I used to work for a VC, and we invested in PushDoctor, a competitor of theirs which also failed, and I remember peoples slight panic at Babylons "AI" and how I was puzzled at that because there clearly was no AI involved. To me as a user, the proposition was a great booking experience and flexible video bookings. I hope eMed manages to keep the good bits running, because I really don't want to go back to my old GP service. EDIT: Actually, I'd be fine with going back to my old GP if they used Babylons booking mechanism and offered video consultations, and maybe used it to provide overflow when they have capacity issues. Nothing wrong with the doctors. This was sort of where PushDoctor was headed when they failed - providing a platform - and it was a real shame.
- ewzimm 3y ago
  This comment is so much more informative than the article. They made a medical UX that people actually wanted to use but oversold the AI. I wonder why nobody tried to merge the front-end with a different AI, or did that fail too?
  - vidarh 3y ago
    I think the big issue here is that from a user point of view the "AI" is mostly uninteresting unless it is really amazing and as long as it's not really bad. As a user I want to resolve my medical issue. If the AI is really bad, it would become a nuisance and force me to go through annoying and poorly thought through questions to get an appointment, and/or make me answer "wrong" to get to where I want to be. Babylons "AI" had few enough questions it didn't feel like a barrier, so at most it was a minor nuisance. Had it been really good, maybe I'd have cared, but what does "really good" look like here? If what I have is ambiguous, or need tests, I still need an appointment. From a user point of view there is no happy case there, even if they get it a point where it saves them money, because it doesn't save me money, and I can't tell if it's saved me time, e.g. by routing me to a person better able to help. So the AI was sold to investors as a means to cut costs by being able to take on more patients per expensive human resource, be it doctors or nurses or others. But you need to make really good decisions so that you don't end up with extra referrals down the line to compensate before you save enough doctors time to fund the software developers and project managers etc. to build that AI. And it seems like they basically got drunk on the valuations mentioning AI got them, took all they money they could get, and then failed to exercise any reasonable cost control when they should have realised that even if they had something really good, the proportion of revenue per patient they could shunt towards development on a per patient basis is small. E.g. in the UK, the NHS pays an average of around 160 pounds / $195 per patient per year to GPs to cover everything. The margin you can extract from that after paying doctors and general practice costs doesn't fund a very large development operation until you get to a very significant scale.

vidarh 3y ago

It's such a shame. From a user point of view they were great. I'm registered with them. The UK GP practice has been taken over by someone else (eMed) The app was great. I got appointments fast until very recently. The triage was basic, though, but to an end-user it wouldn't have been obvious to what extent their business plan relied on that for the shot at future profitability. I used to work for a VC, and we invested in PushDoctor, a competitor of theirs which also failed, and I remember peoples slight panic at Babylons "AI" and how I was puzzled at that because there clearly was no AI involved. To me as a user, the proposition was a great booking experience and flexible video bookings. I hope eMed manages to keep the good bits running, because I really don't want to go back to my old GP service. EDIT: Actually, I'd be fine with going back to my old GP if they used Babylons booking mechanism and offered video consultations, and maybe used it to provide overflow when they have capacity issues. Nothing wrong with the doctors. This was sort of where PushDoctor was headed when they failed - providing a platform - and it was a real shame.

ewzimm 3y ago
This comment is so much more informative than the article. They made a medical UX that people actually wanted to use but oversold the AI. I wonder why nobody tried to merge the front-end with a different AI, or did that fail too?
- vidarh 3y ago
  I think the big issue here is that from a user point of view the "AI" is mostly uninteresting unless it is really amazing and as long as it's not really bad. As a user I want to resolve my medical issue. If the AI is really bad, it would become a nuisance and force me to go through annoying and poorly thought through questions to get an appointment, and/or make me answer "wrong" to get to where I want to be. Babylons "AI" had few enough questions it didn't feel like a barrier, so at most it was a minor nuisance. Had it been really good, maybe I'd have cared, but what does "really good" look like here? If what I have is ambiguous, or need tests, I still need an appointment. From a user point of view there is no happy case there, even if they get it a point where it saves them money, because it doesn't save me money, and I can't tell if it's saved me time, e.g. by routing me to a person better able to help. So the AI was sold to investors as a means to cut costs by being able to take on more patients per expensive human resource, be it doctors or nurses or others. But you need to make really good decisions so that you don't end up with extra referrals down the line to compensate before you save enough doctors time to fund the software developers and project managers etc. to build that AI. And it seems like they basically got drunk on the valuations mentioning AI got them, took all they money they could get, and then failed to exercise any reasonable cost control when they should have realised that even if they had something really good, the proportion of revenue per patient they could shunt towards development on a per patient basis is small. E.g. in the UK, the NHS pays an average of around 160 pounds / $195 per patient per year to GPs to cover everything. The margin you can extract from that after paying doctors and general practice costs doesn't fund a very large development operation until you get to a very significant scale.