Your next doctor’s appointment? Artificial intelligence
‘MY STOMACH is killing me!”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” says a female voice. “Are you happy to answer a few questions?”
And so the consultation begins. Where’s the pain? How bad is it? Does it come and go? There’s some deliberation before you get an opinion. “This sounds like dyspepsia to me. Dyspepsia is doctor-speak for indigestion.”
Doctor-speak, maybe, but it’s not a doctor speaking. The female voice belongs to Babylon, part of a wave of new AI (artificial intelligence) apps designed to relieve your doctor of needless paperwork and office visits—and reduce the time you have to wait for medical advice. If you’re feeling unwell, instead of calling a doctor, you use your phone to chat with an AI.
The idea is to make seeking advice about a medical condition as simple as Googling your symptoms, but with many more benefits. Unlike self-diagnosis online, these apps lead you through a clinical-grade triage process—they’ll tell you if your symptoms need urgent attention or if you can treat yourself with bed rest and ibuprofen instead.
The tech is built on a grab bag of AI techniques: language processing to allow users to describe their symptoms in a casual way, expert systems to mine huge medical databases, machine learning to string together correlations between symptom and condition.
Babylon Health, a Londonbased digital-first health-care provider, has a mission statement it likes to share in a big, bold font: to put an accessible and affordable health service in the hands of every person on earth. The best way to do this, says the company’s founder, Ali Parsa, is to stop people from needing to see a doctor.
When in doubt, the apps will always recommend seeking a second, human opinion.
But by placing themselves between us and medical professionals, they shift the front line of health care.
When the Babylon Health app started giving advice on ways to self-treat, half the company’s patients stopped asking for an appointment, realising they didn’t need one.
Babylon is not the only app of its kind—others include Ada, Your.MD, and Dr. AI.
But Babylon is the frontrunner because it’s been integrated with the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), showing how such tech could change the way health services are run and paid for.
Last year Babylon started a trial with a hospital trust in London in which calls to the NHS’s advice line are handled partly by Babylon’s AI. Callers are asked if they want to wait for a human to pick up or download the Babylonpowered “NHS Online: 111” app instead.
Around 40,000 people have already opted for the app. Between late January and early October 2017, 40 per cent of those who used the app were directed to self-treatment options rather than a doctor—around three times the proportion of people who spoke to a human operator.
But both the AI and the humans staffing the phone line told the same proportion of people to seek emergency care (21 per cent).
When the app started giving advice on ways to self-treat, half of patients stopped asking for an appointment, realising they didn’t need one.