Babylon and Microsoft join forces to improve healthcare through AI

Babylon and Microsoft have teamed up with the aim of using artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve accessibility of healthcare worldwide.

The new partnership also aims to address affordability issues and improve the quality of healthcare. Through exploring opportunities to enhance current artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools the tech companies aim to shift focus “from sick care to preventative healthcare”.

The first stage of the collaboration will see Babylon Cloud Services, the company’s digital health software solution, made available on Microsoft’s Azure Marketplace.

This will allow payers and providers to access Babylon’s AI-powered symptom checker and Healthcheck services via the marketplace, which current reaches more than four million monthly users across 140 different areas.

Tom McGuinness, corporate vice president of global healthcare and life sciences at Microsoft, said: “This collaboration will allow us to build on our existing capabilities so we can proactively support patients through the devices they already own, and shift the focus from reactive to proactive healthcare.

“We look forward to bringing our collective expertise and technologies to drive innovation in healthcare and capitalize on the current digital health revolution by improving the personalisation, automation and digitisation of the healthcare journey for both clinicians and patients.”

Following Babylon’s availability on the Azure Marketplace, the company will also use Microsoft’s products to support its technology stack across multiple services.

Ali Parsa, chief executive of Babylon, added: “Babylon and Microsoft working together shows our combined commitment to build on our leading-edge digital health technologies and deliver better access and greater affordability for health systems and patients alike.

“We share the same vision of healthcare and believe that by bringing our assets together we can further the digital health revolution, offer immediate access to all-in-one personalised care and we can enhance the consumer experience, improve patient outcomes and reduce overall costs.”