Whilst there is now global consensus on the importance of self-care and recently published guidance from the WHO, there remains a need for a seismic shift when it comes to implementation.
Barriers to self care: Access and affordability:
We created Babylon with a single ambition: To make healthcare accessible and affordable for every person on Earth.
Accessible:
To make it more accessible, we can leverage the fact that the majority of the population is connected through mobile networks. We are working to deliver most of the services most people need through the devices most already have. devices they already have that will make it much more accessible than what it used to be in the past when people had to travel from the villages town cities on the buses or cars into the doctor’s surgeries and clinics to be seen.
In Rwanda today we deliver health care to the entire population where the government has made digital first primary care universally available to the most remote villages to the center of the galley to the towns to the cities in one of the financially poorest countries in the world we do the same in UK one of the richest countries in the world in Canada United States
However, there is no accessibility without affordability, and this is a bigger challenge.
To bring costs down, we need to understand the origins. There are two main cost sources in any health delivery system.
Firstly salaries, which account for two-thirds of the global spend in the sector. In every country, healthcare professionals are an expensive resource. At the same time, they’re in short supply. The latest estimates from the WHO state that the world is short of 7.2 million healthcare workers, and this figure rises to 12.9 million by 2035.
Secondly, timing. By the time most patients seek medical attention, a minor problem has grown into a bigger one, requiring relatively expensive treatment. When unaddressed, a $10 problem can become a $100 solution, and management for preventable, predictable diseases end up commanding almost 60% of the overall spend.
So everything we are doing with our technology is to solve for these main cost sources by enabling automation and prediction.
Automation: To make healthcare affordable, we must optimise clinicians’ time and focus. Tasks that can be automated must be, so medical professionals can spend their time doing what machines can’t.
Prediction: To solve this, we must develop monitoring technologies that can identify nascent issues and enable prompt action. Early diagnosis, health assessment and predictive analysis are crucial. In this scenario, healthcare becomes about keeping people at the peak of their health, rather than crisis management for the sick.
We’re combining human expertise with the power of technology to drive solutions forward on these fronts. By doing so, it’s possible to radically rework the system everywhere, for everyone.
We’ve created a digital-first model of healthcare delivery, which starts with AI (self care), and only connects to a clinician virtually when needed, and arranges physical examinations and intervention only when clinically necessary.
We’ve created a digital first, end-to-end healthcare delivery model that aims to meet most people’s needs, in sickness and in health. We offer a continuum of AI, virtual, and physical healthcare to serve each person most appropriately, according to their needs.
So to sum up, as most costs in healthcare are spent on salaries and predictable preventable diseases, fundamental cost reduction will only be possible through, respectively, automation and prediction; and then directing users to the right part of our service for their needs. All three have to come together to enable the service to be affordable. Automation allows us to reduce the high labour costs that other healthcare providers see, prediction allows us to intervene in the medical issue earlier than the patient would previously and direction to the correct service allows members to avoid using expensive parts of our service such as consultations when they could be safely cared for more cost-effectively.
To make this affordable therefore, we need to create a very disciplined funnel that delivers the most appropriate care at the most appropriate cost to each patient according to their needs, while minimising the use of scarce and expensive clinical resources.
The following pyramid illustrates how we need to be constantly innovating to move care from the top of the pyramid downwards, while maintaining or improving that care, to achieve the associated cost saving.
Covid19 forced us to start looking at the way we deliver health care in a fundamentally different way. What the system experienced was that as soon as the pressure on the system grew, almost the entire functionality of the system at the beginning came to a halt forcing everybody to rethink the way they’ve been delivering healthcare. At Babylon we deployed our technology and our capability and everything we had learned in the last five years to be able to deliver this pyramid model.
We have shown how effective this approach was for the management of COVID-19, and now need to deploy it everywhere else, especially for the management of chronic conditions that consume the bulk of the resources in healthcare.
Regulation:
As senior clinicians and scientists at babylon, we take our responsibilities to provide safe and effective care extremely seriously. Creating services that are available anytime, anywhere at the touch of a smartphone button is core to what we do, but even more important is the ongoing testing, quality improvement and external assurance that we undertake to ensure the clinical safety of all elements of our work. Our job is not just to build and provide great services across the world, it is to set the climate and culture across the 2000 people who work for babylon, including 200 GPs, embedding patient safety as a priority in everything we do. We believe in transparency, we welcome the feedback from the global community of clinical colleagues and the general public, and above all we know that no matter how a service performs today, it can always be better tomorrow. By setting out our approach, we hope to bring even greater transparency to our work, to help raise the bar on patient safety, and to dispel a few myths along the way
Babylon provides a suite of digital health services, provided via mobile applications and on the web. One component of these services is the ability for people to use a symptom checker to check their symptoms
Integral to our clinical safety approach is the clinical evaluation of all products, and the clinical safety and risk management processes that are in place across all products and services. To ensure the continued safety and effectiveness of any products in a live environment the above elements are regularly reviewed and updated, overseen by a Clinical Safety team, and documented in the Clinical Safety Management System, as per recognised NHS Digital safety standards.
The triage system described above is regulated under the EU Regulation on Medical Devices 2017/745, overseen by the MHRA in the UK, and is registered as a Class 1 Medical Device. The system is also CE marked, demonstrating compliance with all relevant European standards.
Prior to deployment of the triage system within the NHS service a thorough process of due diligence was undertaken alongside NHS England colleagues
All triage algorithms undergo thorough clinical evaluation both pre- and post-market, with this process being repeated for all major updates since initial release.