Babylon Health is building an integrated, AI-based health app to serve a city of 300K in England
0Reported today on TechCrunch
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Babylon Health is building an integrated, AI-based health app to serve a city of 300K in England
After announcing a $550 million fundraise last August, U.K. AI-based health services startup Babylon Health is putting some of that money to use with its widest-ranging project to date. The company has inked a 10-year deal with the city of Wolverhampton in England to provide an integrated health app covering 300,000 people, the entire population of the city.
The financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but Babylon confirmed that the NHS is not taking a stake in the startup as part of it. The plan is to start rolling out the first phase of the app by the end of this year.
Babylon Health is known for building AI-based platforms that help diagnose patients' issues. Babylon's services are provided as a complement to seeing actual clinicians - the idea being that the interactions and AI can speed up some of the work of getting people seen and into the system. Some of Babylon's best known work to date has been a chatbot that it built for the NHS in the U.K., and, in addition to working with a number of private businesses on their employee healthcare services, it is also now in the process of rolling out services in 11 countries in Asia. (In August, Babylon said it was delivering 4,000 clinical consultations each day, or one patient interaction every 10 seconds; covering 4.3 million people worldwide; with more than 1.2 million digital consultations completed to date.)
Even with all these milestones passed - milestones that have helped catapult Babylon to a $2 billion valuation - its latest project will be its most ambitious to date: it will be the first time that Babylon works on a project that combines both hospital and primary medic