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Without much fanfare, some of the biggest names in tech have been pulling back on once-enthusiastic efforts to disrupt healthcare.
Within the past nine months, Alphabet Inc has dismantled its healthcare division Google Health while IBM sold its Watson Health data and analytics business to a private equity firm, having struggled to turn a profit. It turns out healthcare is a highly complex industry and much of the hype around the transformative promise of artificial intelligence may have been overblown.
That reality has hit hard in the UK, whose influx of investment into health tech comes thanks to the internationally respected, centralised National Health Service (NHS) that has tested new technology through a special department called NHSX.
Health tech refers to a market in which companies use technology to solve healthcare problems. These range from chatbots to help patients triage symptoms of an illness to fitness trackers to monitor a patient’s vital signs with a fitness tracker to machine-learning algorithms to make hospital waiting rooms more efficient.
A growing cohort of mental health apps for consumers offers to help people manage stress or sleep better. Many of these systems say they use artificial intelligence, which can give them a funding boost in private markets.
In fact, funding for health-tech startups has soared in the UK from $420 million in 2016 to approximately $3.8 billion in 2021 according to data from database management firm Dealroom and London promotional agency London & Partners. That put Britain in third place behind the US and China for health-tech investment last year.
That funding is driven by the Golden Triangle of academic expertise between London, Oxford and Cambridge, which covers five of the world’s top 25 universities for life sciences and medicines.
But some of the country’s more mature health-tech firms, which got into
this game early, are going through something of a midlife crisis, exacerbated by the wider loss of momentum in the pandemic health-tech boom in the US.
Part of the problem, according to staff and entrepreneurs from multiple health-tech firms, has been a clash of cultures between the ambitious and iterative world of engineering — where problems can be solved with the right algorithm — and the world of medicine, which calls for a more cautious approach.
Medical researchers at health-tech firms have
complained of being
steamrolled by the move-fast-and-break-things approach of highly paid software engineers.
The techies, for their part, complain of being unable to experiment freely in a world obsessed with patient safety and regulation.
The resulting stumbles from this culture clash not only hurts company profits, it also threatens to corrode patient trust in the NHS and other healthcare systems.
Among the more affected British players is Sensyne Health Plc, which uses artificial intelligence to analyse patient records to help pharmaceutical companies develop new medicines.
To get that data, Sensyne has signed agreements with a handful of NHS trusts, such as Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and Exeter NHS Trust; together they own a 16.2% stake in the firm in return for sharing patient data that the company says is anonymised.
But Sensyne found itself on the brink of collapse last month, after the company said it was on the verge of running out of cash and cutting the majority of its staff, according to Sky News.
—Bloomberg