‘Sending a rocket to Mars is difficult. We just want to put GPs on an app’

I look like Danny DeVito, but I used to be tall and blond,” Ali Parsa jokes as he gives a guided tour around his colourful offices in London’s South Kensington. The 51-year-old Iranian-born businessman is the founder of Babylon Healthcare, a start-up that is pioneering the way we access medical care. He’s a former Goldman Sachs banker who left the industry to pursue his entrepreneurial ambitions. First, as boss of hospital group Circle Health, before founding Babylon in 2013.

“At Circle, I couldn’t persuade the board to do anything beyond what they were doing,” Parsa says. “I had lost control of the business to a bunch of bankers and lawyers, so I thought I would start again. The day the papers announced I was leaving I got five phone calls from people saying, whatever you do next, we’ll back it.” A few years later, Babylon was born.

Parsa is not your typical entrepreneur, however. He fled Iran as a teenager in the 1970s during the revolution, leaving his family and idyllic, middle-class life on the banks of the Caspian Sea behind. “I was supporting the wrong group of people,” he says. He made his way through Europe and sought refuge in Britain, where he was granted asylum at the age of just 16. He came to UK with nothing, but, given support, he buckled down and completed his A-levels in just nine months, despite also having to learn English. “I calculated I wouldn’t get to university until I was in my 20s,” he says. “At that age, it seems like such a long time. I was offered a scholarship to UCL and Cambridge. I chose UCL because I thought it must be better as it is in a big city.”

His journey from refugee to successful businessman is remarkable, but Parsa brushes aside his achievements. “I came from a professional middle class family. I didn’t have a deprived childhood. What I did can be made to sound amazing, but amazing would have been if I came from an uneducated poor family in a village in Afghanistan.

“In a way, and with the benefit of hindsight, that difficulty of being pushed out from a comfortable life into something that was highly uncomfortable was perhaps desirable, because it gave me the ability to stand on my own two feet.”

It certainly worked for Parsa – and it appears to be doing the same for Babylon. The company has developed a virtual GP service accessible through an app. Users can book an appointment to see a doctor on screen, often within minutes. The subscription fee is just £5 a month - so considerably cheaper than seeing a private GP in Harley Street.

Babylon also offers consultations with specialists and therapists, and doctors can give referrals, send patients for diagnostic testing and email prescriptions to their nearest pharmacy. It has a function to allow you to triage yourself and is experimenting with using algorithms to make diagnoses, freeing up doctors’ valuable time.

According to Parsa, one in every 200 people in Britain is registered with Babylon. It’s also used by large corporations, such as Facebook and Citigroup and has partnerships with large insurers, such as Aviva and Bupa.

An NHS clinic in Essex uses Babylon, and one in every five of its consultations is now virtual. “As a result waiting times in the practice have fallen substantially for first time in nine years,” Parsa says.

He’s realistic about Babylon’s limitations: it’s a way to cater to some of the UK population, but by no means all of it. Not everyone will be comfortable seeing a GP through a tablet or smartphone.

“How does a 90-year-old who is suffering from dementia use Babylon? She can’t. But it doesn’t mean that we have to shoot it down because some people don’t use it. You have to provide different solutions for different people. No system is perfect,” he says.

“The GP surgery has stayed in the 1940s model and resisted every kind of change. The biggest talk in healthcare now is, let’s have super-hubs of GPs, you know what that is? The supermarket of the 1950s. They are just catching up, we have Ocado today. I mean come on.”

But Parsa isn’t just setting his sights on Britain. “Babylon’s mission is to make healthcare affordable and accessible to every human being on Earth,” he says. “We want to do with healthcare what Google did with information. When you explain to people what we are doing, their jaws drop. But this is not difficult. What Elon Musk is doing sending SpaceX to Mars, that is difficult. Putting a doctor in front of a screen to help you with your clinical needs, that is relatively speaking not difficult.”

The first overseas project is in Rwanda, where a month ago the Government contracted Babylon to offer telephone-based and digital GP visits to the country’s 12 million inhabitants. Parsa’s hoping Babylon will allow Rwandans to leapfrog bricks-and-mortar GP surgeries in the same way that mobile banking technology has been adopted in east Africa. “Rwanda is a progressive country. Everyone has a mobile phone and in the fourth year of mobile banking, everyone was on it. Yesterday in Rwanda we did four times as many consultations as we did in the UK. The demand is insatiable.”

How did he come up with the idea for Babylon? “What I noticed at Circle was that 95pc of healthcare needs are not dealt with in hospital and that you get care in the most arcane, stupid way.

“And it is not just that you have to wait a long time to go into one of the most infected places on earth to see a doctor. The challenge with that model is we are short of five million doctors around the world. So you have this asymmetry of supply and demand and the result is that 50pc of the global population have no clinical care.”

And yet, he says, pointing to his mobile phone, “everyone has one of these”.

At home in Britain, the NHS hasn’t quite opened up to the idea of using Babylon, but it could just be a matter of time. After all, GPs aren’t NHS employees, they are private partnerships contracted by the NHS to look after patients. Compared to bricks-and-mortar clinics, Babylon is significantly cheaper. “My hope was the country that gave birth to the universal health service can create the company that makes universal health service for the globe,” Parsa says.

The company is able to expand because it is well-funded, with a number of private investors backing the company through multi-billion pound funds.

“My great partners have been phenomenal,” says Parsa. “You have to choose your funders incredibly carefully, they are like family. God forbid I divorce my wife, but I can’t divorce my investors, they sit on my board forever.”

He says he’s often shocked at how some entrepreneurs take money “willy-nilly” from anyone who offers it. He’s also sceptical about venture capital funds. With Circle, for instance, Parsa says there were some backers who were a “disaster”.

“They had no idea what they were doing, a bunch of ex-investment bankers. And all they could think about was maximising returns. And the problem with them was, once it became a £200m business, they were like, wow let’s cash in, as opposed to, this is the basics of building a £2bn business. We had a lot of excellent investors, but one that almost ruined it for everybody.”

Babylon’s investors range from the founders of Innocent, to the people who created DeepMind and are now the global heads of Google’s artificial intelligence business. It also has backing from an €8bn private family fund in Europe and private investment group BXR.

“Our investors are chosen because of the value that they can give us, not just money,” he says. “These are very long-term investors and if I had advice for other entrepreneurs it’s to make sure that the investors that come along with you share your vision.”

So is Babylon making a profit? Parsa laughs, “No no, of course not. We won’t be making a profit for a long time.” That’s because the company spends a lot of money on people – scientists, mathematicians, engineers and doctors – who don’t come cheap.

It also has wafer-thin margins. “We believe in charging the minimum you need, rather than the maximum you can get away with,” says Parsa. “That is why you are sitting on £10 chairs and wood desks made of scaffolding.”

So is there enough cash in the pot to keep the company going for the next few years? “Oh no. We constantly need to raise money. But that is OK. The world is full of money and people wanting to be part of solving a problem. So our challenge isn’t funding, it’s making sure we can deliver that solution.”

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/10/22/sending-a-rocket-to-mars-is-difficult-we-just-want-to-put-gps-on/