Babylon founder Ali Parsa is rising from the wreckage with a new startup – Quadrivia – and he’s certainly hoping that his second AI wonder app works out better than his first.
A LinkedIn post from Parsa laid out Quadrivia’s vision of using customizable AI agents to tackle “the main challenge” in healthcare: the structural imbalance between the elastic demand from our communities and the constrained supply of our clinicians.
- Quadrivia’s undisclosed amount of seed funding was enough to kick off beta testing for Qu, a clinical assistant with “wide-ranging capabilities across the care spectrum.”
- Qu’s agents have the lofty goal of assisting clinicians across the full stack of routine clinical and administrative tasks, patient interactions, decision-making, chronic and postoperative care, and continuous monitoring.
Qu’s ambitious scope is reportedly made possible by its dual architecture: “System 1 includes tasks that rely on quick decision-making, such as answering direct questions. System 2 involves more complex tasks, like assessing patient symptoms and considering multiple diagnoses.”
- These capabilities are supported by the patient’s EHR data (still working out the details), natural language conversations (but not real time), and a large clinical knowledge base (unclear from where).
The backstory of Quadrivia is inextricably linked to the backstory of Babylon, which has been called everything from the “future of the NHS” to “the Madoff of digital health.”
- The grand promises of Babylon’s AI chatbot rhymed with the goals Qu outlined above, which was enough to fuel a $4.2B public market debut in 2021.
- By this time last year, what we’ll call “difficulty living up to those promises” had Babylon shares trading at pennies, and it filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. after an odd takeover from digital therapeutics developer MindMaze turned out to be too good to be true.
The Takeaway
If Quadrivia is to succeed where Babylon failed, it’ll need a strategy that shores up the holes in its predecessor’s approach. That means peer-reviewed research, independent validation, and consistent messaging about Qu’s capabilities… and limitations.
