David Oliver: Lessons from the Babylon Health saga

The long awaited evaluation of Babylon Health’s GP at Hand service has been published.1 It found that patients had fewer health problems than conventional users of GP services, were younger, and yet were higher users of services such as NHS 111 and urgent care.2 The report noted that GP at Hand didn’t provide the full range of services that conventional general practices do and that expanding such a model would have considerable implications for IT, infrastructure, and the GP workforce. But it could “not fully assess whether GP at Hand is affordable or sustainable.”3 GP at Hand’s presence in Hammersmith and Fulham Clinical Commissioning Group has reportedly faced big and growing costs (estimated at £10m so far) from hosting GP at Hand, which supports patients living in other parts of London—putting general practice delivery …