Babylon Pulls a Rabbit Out of the Hat, with $4.2 Billion SPAC Deal

Babylon’s shiny packaging disguises poor AI

With yesterday’s news, Babylon culminates a massive consolidation and acquisition flurry in the digital health industry that started with COVID last year.  Covid has been horrible for the world.  But one of a few industries that has benefited from COVID has definitely been the digital health industry.

The $4.2 billion SPAC deal places Babylon’s valuation at 53x company’s 2020 revenue and 13x company’s guided 2021 revenue.  These are mind blowing valuations (again, this is revenue, not profit).  Reminds me of the 1990s tech bubble.

The biggest story here is how Babylon got so successful, albeit being widely criticized – both by professional groups and academics – for the lack of good information on the performance of Babylon’s statistical models.  Babylon’s 2018 comparison study – which was later published in the November 2020 issue of the Frontiers of Artificial Intelligence – was poorly conducted, with only 7 doctors and a small number of vignettes.  Despite these statistical deficiencies, Babylon claimed its assistant performed at least as good as doctors did.  The NHS had to block the Babylon app’s release in 2018 due to patient safety concerns.

In a separate December 2020 study, researchers from ADA Health worked on a larger sample of 200 vignettes and found that, among eight most popular digital health assistants on the market, Babylon’s digital health assessment app had only 32% accuracy for top-3 diagnoses vs human doctors’ 82%, nowhere close to Babylon’s claim of having doctor-like accuracy of diagnoses.

Two obvious problems with all these studies:

• The studies are written by parties directly interested in the results. A true independent studies are needed.
• More importantly, the sample size is statistically insignificant. At the age of super computing, why do we stop at 200 vignettes?  Why not look at thousands?

Despite of all these (at best) very mixed results regarding performance of its statistical models, Babylon has been attracting multiple investors.

As it turned out in Babylon’s story, it’s not the model that matters.  It’s about the message of how AI could help.

Kudos to Babylon!

At WellAI, we use artificial intelligence for what we believe artificial intelligence is supposed to be used for: quick, efficient, cheap and accurate information by means of access to the knowledge of 30+ million medical studies.

Try WellAI for yourself and/or your patients.  The price for our flagship voice guided digital health assistant is still super low at $39.99 per year (which is equivalent to $3.33 per month).  You can make your purchase directly on our website https://wellai.health or at the App Store or on Google Play on your smartphone.

If you want to learn more about this breakthrough technology that is meant to provide unique access to scientific health information to everyone and to dramatically improve your health knowledge, please schedule a 1-on-1 demo:

• If you are a doctor, an employer, a health benefits advisor, or an insurance broker and would like a cool benefit that makes your employees healthier and happier, and saves your business time and money, please schedule a virtual meeting here.
• If you are a potential investor who would like to be part of a unique once-in-a-lifetime investment opportunity that will forever revolutionize healthcare, please schedule a virtual meeting here.
• If you are a potential customer, a patient or you are just curious about any of the WellAI high tech products – a voice-guided digital health assistant, data-driven Telehealth 2.0, or the scientific chronic disease management program – please schedule a virtual meeting here.

Stay healthy!  Be knowledgeable about your health!