Hospital Corporation of America in 2017 to build 138 bed specialist hospital on the trust’s Edgbaston campus. The £65 million development will have 66 private beds, run by HCA Healthcare, and 72 NHS beds, run by the trust, a new radiotherapy unit and operating theatres. Construction, by Vinci Construction UK started in May 2019. The Department of Health and Social Care lent the combined trust £162 million in May 2018. £87 million was for a new ambulatory care and diagnostics centre at Heartlands Hospital. The trust opened an office in Beijing in October 2018, hoping to find business opportunities in China, which could include consultancy, the trust's in-house clinical software, and advice about the construction of new hospitals. In May 2019 it was negotiating with Babylon Health with plans to use the technology for virtual outpatient consultations, chronic disease management, and triage both before and after patients arrived at the emergency department using Babylon’s symptom checker app. The ambition was that the symptom checker could refer patients directly to specialist clinics, avoiding its accident & emergency (A&E) department. The Birmingham Local Medical Committee said this was "a truly frightening prospect that is going to be nothing but massively damaging for healthcare in Birmingham". The trust was one of the biggest beneficiaries of capital funding for the NHS in August 2019, with an allocation of £97.1 million for a purpose built building for outpatient, treatment and diagnostic services. It began trials of a Remote Diagnostic Station in 2020. This enables multi-disciplinary teams to give remote clinical support using digital stethoscopes and ECGs to review and provide diagnoses for patients. During the COVID pandemic, the trust made numerous changes and reorganisations to its hospital services to ensure patient care in safe environments while also treating Covid 19 patients. In March 2020, a Birmingham children’s A&E department was temporarily shut. In April 2020 supportive care and chemotherapy treatment of cancer patients was relocated to Solihull. At the same time Heartlands Hospital's Gynaecology Assessment Unit was temporarily moved to Good Hope with home-birth services being suspended. In June 2021, a senior delegation of NHS England and NHSX visited University Hospitals Birmingham to assess the feasibility of a comprehensive extension of an AI triage model, based on that used by Babylon, which had already been used by NHS University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB) since April 2020. In October 2021, Professor David Rosser, chief