Accelerator company Ufonia wins funding for pioneering innovation to help deliver a Net Zero NHS

Dora, an artificial intelligence enabled autonomous clinical assistant, developed by Ufonia, a company currently on the DigitalHealth.London Accelerator programme, is able to telephone patients and conduct a routine clinical conversation, leading to increased clinical capacity, reduced costs and a more reliable, convenient and consistent experience for patients. The SBRI healthcare award will support Ufonia to work with Oxford AHSN and St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, where Dora will be used to triage people referred to Head and Neck cancer services.

Climate change is a major threat to health, impacting on both the provision of services and the resilience of healthcare systems and the NHS is the world’s first healthcare system to commit to achieving net zero carbon emissions. 

To help respond to this challenge, SBRI Healthcare’s 18th competition, ‘Delivering a Net Zero NHS’, was launched as a development funding competition, in partnership with the Greener NHS Programme, the AHSN Network and Accelerated Access Collaborative. The competition sought innovations that could help reduce carbon emissions and maintain or improve the overall delivery of healthcare within the NHS.

SBRI Healthcare awarded £1 million to ten innovations to help deliver a Net Zero NHS – reducing carbon emissions and improving healthcare. The newly funded projects aim to bring benefits to patients and care service users, whilst reducing carbon emissions.

Ufonia, one of ten successful recipients of the award, will be supported to work with Oxford AHSN and St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Dora will be used to triage people referred to Head and Neck cancer services, one of the highest demand pathways in the NHS, that currently produces over 2million tonnes of CO2e.

Katrina Mason, Senior Clinical Fellow, Ufonia said: “Having first hand experienced the wealth of opportunity and support the DigitalHealth.London team have offered me through my experience as a DigitalHealth.London Digital Pioneer Fellow, I have no doubt the Accelerator programme will help us scale Ufonia’s autonomous telemedicine innovation thereby providing maximal benefit to the NHS.”

Ufonia is a member of the sixth cohort of the DigitalHealth.London Accelerator programme.

The DigitalHealth.London Accelerator is a collaborative programme funded by two of London’s Academic Health Science Networks – UCL Partners, and the Health Innovation Network, as well as MedCity, CW+ and receives match funding from the European Regional Development Fund.