Too Much AI May Not Be Good for Your Health or the NHS; Google and IBM exits map trend
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 U.K, whose influx of investment into health tech comes thanks to the internationally respected, centralized National Health Service 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 U.S. and China for health-tech investment last year.(1)
That funding is driven by the Golden Triangle of academic expertise between London, Oxford and Cambridge, which covers five of
Read more on tech.hindustantimes.com
