We put a config flag in to switch between the two models they were going back and forth between and just twiddled it every week for months. There was some set charge every time they did it. They had the opposite problem with anything that actually mattered where they couldn't make a decision at all. Some of that software is still running in hospitals 10+ years later with apparently little change since the the NPfIT died.

I moved out of the healthcare domain shortly after that. A few years ago I tried to sell some software for next to nothing to the NHS for a team my wife worked for. A simple webapp backed by a DB instead of spreadsheets on a shared drive. They took the idea and gave it to an in house employee who was running it as a side project (charging more for it than I was) and never finished building it.

Speaking to someone in charge of innovation for a large part of the country recently, he said he couldn't even take some software I'd offered for a free trial. As he saw it the system was so broken he was warning everyone off. And his job was innovation.

The NHS is ripe for improvement. I suspect its management haven't got a clue what they're doing though and fear the lure of big tech firms will be the only thing they can't resist.

Essentially, different healthcare systems have different needs which are reflected in how their electronic health record systems are architected. For example, EHRs in the US are optimized for billing, and if you're moving an US-centric EHR, like Epic, to a country like Denmark with universal healthcare, all that functionality becomes superfluous. Not to mention the language differences, as well, which are touched upon in the article. It's possible that similar concerns played into the NHS's decision to build their own system. Some NHS trusts are moving forward with their own Epic implementations, however. For example: https://www.digitalhealth.net/2018/06/royal-devon-exeter-nhs...

I said it must have been interesting, lots to learn about. She replied that the NHS was the best in the world and there was nothing to learn about from anyone else in any respect.

Sadly, although I remain convinced many people must be slogging against the system, I suspect she isn't alone in that view.

The current Secretary of State at the Department of Health and Social Care is pushing open standards and interoperability, but has an idealogical attachment to private companies providing software after competitive tender.

Which is silly given who actually owns large parts of British infrastructure but... We have a confluence of shitty corrupt middle managers masquerading as politicians and a terrible press.

I honestly have come to the conclusion that the UK is pretty fucked in the mid to long term.

I don't get it. Babylon is just another provider. There's not much difference between Babylon and other GP providers - they get your data if you're their patient and not otherwise. They're subjected to the same rules as other GPs.

There isn't some huge database somewhere of "all the NHS data" that providers can dip into. Each provider has it's own data, with little bits fed-back into the gp system or the spine.

Babylon is unlike any other providers; it is an AI & Data first, app-based subscription model with a mix of state funded services. It's aim is to acquire more data in order to train models. The overwhelming majority of traditional GP's are primarily focused on patient first policy ─ they are usually non-profit with scant resources and a poor to non-existent IT strategy. To normalise these new models by trivialising differences between traditional services (as flawed, as they might be) would only serve to marginalise existing practices and it is the first step towards introducing scope-creep by politicians, who have an unhealthy obsession with statistics, quick fixes and making Faustian pacts with the private sector.

Babylon claims to go beyond any GP by being on par with human doctors and boasts of it's partnerships with Samsung and Tencent and counts DeepMind as one of it's investors. Just like any startup looking to disrupt, the platform is cloud-based and hosted on AWS[1]. It records every interaction, including video ─ which is retained for later review. It is growing at an exponential rate, despite a limited presence in London. The patient database reveals that it caters to a very specific demographic across varied and different parts of the city i.e. 83% of patients are aged between 20 to 39 years.

While it is still in it's infancy, it has already been involved in legal tussles and has been accused of dubious practices[2][3]. There is no visibility on algorithms, models and related datasets nor is there any indication of AI ethics being in place. There is also the issue of the CEO being linked to a white elephant project before his current fast-tracked foray into digital healthcare, which was probably rubber-stamped by officials in Whitehall. Although, it is undeniable that the NHS is overburdened and could do with some help to ease the pressure, but Babylon seems to be doing the exact opposite by applying the 'moving fast-breaking things' ethos inside an institution, which is already broken and moving slow.

I have already linked the Wired article, which discusses some of the topics above in-depth, other facts are supported by the FT article (paywall) and Forbes, which are reasonably reputable sources in my opinion.

https://www.ft.com/content/19dc6b7e-8529-11e8-96dd-fa565ec55...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/12/17/this-heal...

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/startups/how-babylon-health-bui...

[2] https://www.digitalhealth.net/2017/12/babylon-healthcare-cqc...

[3] https://www.artificialintelligence-news.com/2019/04/12/babyl...