A London-based artificial intelligence (AI) company which specializes in using AI for health says that in tests its app has outperformed human doctors in diagnosing medical conditions. Babylon Health is one of a number of startups tapping into the promise of AI to help patients and physicians speedily assess symptoms and connect them with doctors. 

Already in the UK, hundreds of thousands of people can use the service as part of the country's National Health Service. One of them is Philip Caudell, a software developer who lives in London. When Babylon first advertised its service offering people the chance to book a doctor's appointment and have a consultation online, he signed up.

At home after work, Phillip is able to talk with a doctor via Skype about the migraines he's been having. He spoke to the doctor just a few hours after booking the appointment, via the app.

"The traditional way for me was waiting two weeks to get an appointment to see my doctor, by which time the conditions either got worse or got better," Phillip Caudell told CGTN. "So for me just to be able to pick up the phone and get peace of mind quickly and conveniently is definitely the future in my opinion," he added.

The Babylon app that Phillip Caudell uses employs AI technology to help doctors diagnose their patients as well as take the hard work out of keeping records. Babylon claims, in fact, that its AI outperformed doctors in diagnosing illnesses in a round of tests. Around six hundred thousand people in the UK are currently using the app, a number which is expected to rise as the service is rolled out across the country.  

In Rwanda, the company offers a similar scheme in conjunction with the Ministry of Health, providing online access to doctors for 2 million subscribers so far. That's approximately one in six of the population.

At its London headquarters, Babylon recently announced it would be investing 100 million US dollars to build the next generation of AI-powered technologies in a bid to help manage long-term conditions. 

"I think artificial intelligence will increasingly do more and more, I think technology will increasingly do more and more of what humans did, allowing humans to focus on parts that we are falling behind on," founder and CEO Dr. Ali Parsa told CGTN.    

He has a global vision for how artificial intelligence can help bring doctors to the world's 50% of the population which currently has no access to healthcare. Indeed, Babylon has begun to work with the Chinese company Tencent through its social messaging platform WeChat to allow people to access its AI to seek medical help. "Globally we are short of five million doctors,” he said, “so what we are doing is freeing the time of the doctors we have to focus on what they should do, allowing the machines to do the easier or more computational work."  

The Babylon app has a key supporter in Britain's Minister for Health, Matt Hancock who attended the recent 100 million US dollars investment announcement and told those gathered that he was also a patient of "GP at Hand," the service powered by Babylon. "In the modern world, many people live in much more flexible ways and have higher expectations in terms of how they can get hold of services. I know this to be true because I am a patient, and I'm a subscriber here and the reason I am is that I'm a busy guy, and I like to have my health needs dealt with on my phone," Mr. Hancock said.  

While the professional body that represents doctors, the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) welcomes the use of technology in Britain's National Health Service, it says it doubts the claims that AI can outperform human doctors when diagnosing a patient and has concerns that health apps like Babylon lack a human touch. 

Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard from the Royal College of GPs told CGTN that she wasn't convinced. "One of the very special parts of the doctor/patient relationship is what GPs build up over time with their patients, understanding the patient and the social context, their family setting, and all those elements aren't going to be captured, however clever the technology is," she said. 

For Dr. Ali Parsa of Babylon, AI is inextricably linked with health-services, where convenience to the user will outweigh concerns about changes in the traditional doctor-patient relationship.

(Cover: Through online healthcare apps, people can book a doctor's appointment and have a consultation online. /VCG Photo)