The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust and Babylon have agreed a 10 year deal to build an integrated, AI-based health app to serve over 300,000 people. The financial details of the deal remain disclosed.
The solution will connect healthcare professionals from across the region, providing remote access to GPs and hospital specialists, live monitoring of patients with chronic conditions, and personalised care plans underpinned by Babylon’s Artificial Intelligence, through a single, free app.
The 10-year partnership is to develop a new healthcare delivery model of ‘Digital-First Integrated Care’.
Babylon said “Patients will get greater control over their own health, faster treatment, fewer trips to hospital, treatment from their own home and greater access to their own data. Staff will have time freed-up for patients with the most urgent and complex issues, avoid duplication, and improve information-sharing.”
It will provide clinical consultations with The Royal Wolverhampton and Babylon doctors and specialist nurses, personal clinical records, health assessment tools and an AI health assistant, as well as health management and monitoring tools. The first services are anticipated to go live this year.
David Loughton, Chief Executive, The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust “I am delighted to announce this long-term partnership with Babylon who will work alongside the Trust’s primary, secondary and community care teams to deliver transformational changes to the way we deliver care.”
“We know from our active engagement with patients of all ages and backgrounds that they are keen to use technology that will improve access and give them greater control of their own health, wellbeing and social inclusion. For example, it should be normal for a patient with a long-term condition to take a blood-test at home, have the results fed into their app which alerts the specialist if they need an appointment. The patient chooses a time to meet, has the consultation through the app, works with their specialist to build a care plan, and the app encourages them to complete it whilst assessing the impact it’s having. This is our vision for properly joined-up and integrated care.”
“We also know from our engagement with clinicians that releasing time to care for our sickest patients is a top priority and there is consensus that this could be facilitated by technology, if we partner with the best and work collaboratively and openly. This partnership with Babylon is rooted in clinical and patient co-design and we recognise that we are going on a journey together to transform our care delivery and our workforce.”
“Workforce is the biggest challenge facing healthcare in the NHS and internationally. In the next ten years the gap between staff needed and the number available could reach almost 250,000 just in England. As medicine transforms over the next 10 years, and cutting-edge technology improves, it is critical that the NHS develops a digitally empowered workforce. With the Trust’s end-to-end care portfolio this is a huge opportunity for us and Babylon to constructively tackle all of these things together.”
“I am confident that this won’t be just good for our patients, it will benefit the wider NHS through early prevention, treatment and the sharing of our learning.”
Ali Parsa, CEO and Founder of Babylon, said “We are extremely proud of this exciting 10-year partnership with RWT which will benefit patients and the NHS as a whole. We have over 1,000 AI experts, clinicians, engineers and scientists who will be helping to make Digital-First Integrated Care a reality and provide fast, effective, proactive care to patients. Together with RWT, we can demonstrate this works and help the NHS lead healthcare across the world.”
