DigitalHealth.London Accelerator Cohort Seven Showcase – Hippo Labs

As Cohort Seven of the DigitalHealth.London Accelerator programme comes to a close, we celebrate the remarkable achievements of our participating companies. In the spotlight today is Hippo Labs and their digital platform Hippo Recaller, which automates the administrative work of preventative care planning and optimises the use of clinical teams.

What is the challenge you are addressing?

Preventative care, such as immunisations, screenings and long-term condition management, is vital for people with or susceptible to long-term conditions. However, GP practices today use legacy systems that make effective preventative care difficult at an organisational level. Completing the vast administrative tasks associated with this care takes practices thousands of hours per year, time that could be better spent on direct patient work. Inefficient processes for booking appointments also waste resources as patients are often matched with an unsuitable clinician for their needs or attend more appointments than are necessary. Every pound spent on prevention returns £14 in social benefit – the Hippo Recaller makes proactive, preventative care simple to keep people healthy and reduce the workload for practices.

What is the solution you have developed and how can it help with the problem?

Hippo Labs has developed a platform that automates the administrative work of preventative care planning and optimises the use of clinical teams. The platform plugs into the patient healthcare record, analyses the entirety of the record to understand the care needs of both an individual and the whole population, then consolidates these needs to minimise appointments and automates the booking process. For providers, everything is automatically populated and it’s a single click to start running recall campaigns. Our intelligent messaging solutions learn and adapt to drive uptake and minimise costs. Our clear, actionable analytics, practices can see how they’re doing and what areas need more work. This all-in-one platform removes the entire administrative burden of preventative care, improving patient and practice outcomes.

What have you achieved while on the DigitalHealth.London Accelerator?

Since starting the DigitalHealth.London Accelerator, the Hippo Recaller has been running at different levels including practices, Primary Care Networks (PCNs), federations and third sector. As the platform has broad applications, it is suited for use with many different providers and partners. including:

Penrose Health at-Scale Practice Group

• Hippo Recaller is their only automated recall tool for all Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) /targets/proactive care work. This means that recall for all long-term condition reviews has been automated, dramatically decreasing the number of hours spent managing this (from 8 – 10 Whole Time Equivalent (WTE) down to 2 WTE) as well as increasing uptake of reviews and outcomes for practices (QOF outcomes are 10% to 20% improved in comparison to last year).
• In addition, the platform has been used for time-sensitive outreach programs such as seasonal influenza and COVID immunisations, allowing practices to reach previous levels of vaccinations a month earlier than last year, with higher uptake overall.

North Lewisham Primary Care Network

• Hippo Recaller was used to improve the percentage of diabetic patients who received all eight care processes across the nine practices in the network. The PCN decided to focus platform usage on the six lowest-performing practices to ‘close the gap’ as part of a local incentive scheme. Where Hippo was used, uptake of services was 2.5 times greater than for the non-focus practices, ending the recall process with outcomes far greater than initially planned.
• We have continued to work with them post-year-end and have made over 2,000 contacts, filling every available PCN diabetes review slot without any manual effort from the practices or the PCN.

One Health Lewisham (OHL) Federation

• Hippo Recaller was used to identify housebound patients requiring a home visit from a mobile healthcare worker. By integrating directly with practice systems and automatically surfacing live lists of patients, we reduced the admin time for OHL’s team by over half.
• Using the platform’s map function, OHL were able to locate patients and by booking thoughtfully, reduce the travel distance for the healthcare worker. This allowed for more reviews in a single day, improving the efficiency of the service offered.

Prostate Cancer UK

• Hippo Recaller has been used to identify and message the population most at risk of having this cancer, inviting relevant patients for a timely cancer review. This is necessary as currently there is no national screening programme for such a common cancer.
• Although we are still early in our implementation here, initial figures look positive and the impact on practices is almost NIL, making this an easy but effective tool to roll out more widely.

Where have you had the best adoption/spread/impact?

The places of best adoption/impact for Hippo Recaller have been for providers who have trialled the product. Where providers have taken advantage of the pilot schemes offered to them, they have found a significant positive impact on their teams’ workload and overall outcomes.

[Hippo Recaller is] quicker than spreadsheets, much more efficient and I can see other long-term conditions. It’s been great for our diabetes campaign. When working with Hippo, it’s made a dramatic change.

Head of Care Coordination at a PCN

Practices have used the platform to recall all QOF indicators, their seasonal influenza, and spring COVID campaigns, even booking patients into services at the hub level and diverting appointments to places with more availability. They have seen greater QOF target achievement, including greater and more appropriate usage of clinical services. This has also freed up hundreds of hours for administrative staff, who now no longer need to focus as much on the timely call/recall process. Dashboarding has been particularly successful, as patient lists are now live in the platform rather than needing to be extracted, downloaded and processed into a presentation.

For the team at Hippo Labs, working with these practices has helped us determine how the platform develops, and better understand what features are useful and how they can be improved. This development has varied from bespoke target onboarding to fleshing out relevant dashboards and metrics, to forming a ‘Manual Recall Team’ where Hippo Labs calls ‘non-responsive’ patients who aren’t responding to automated messages. This function has helped us further hone and develop Hippo Recaller, dramatically increasing platform usage and providing us with significantly more feedback to act upon.

The practices in question decided to continue to implement the platform after the pilot stage as well as make new requests for individual targets they were previously struggling with. For all parties involved, there is no going back to previous ways, as much of the process has been streamlined through the Hippo Recaller platform.

Hippo [Recaller] saves over half the time – that is over three months work for two care coordinators.

Lead Care Coordinator at a PCN

How have you made the most of your time on the DigitalHealth.London Accelerator?

Meeting people through the Accelerator has allowed us to form relationships and even partnerships with adjacent companies. This has improved our product and allowed us to move at a faster pace, providing a better service and platform as a whole.

The monthly catch-ups have been informative and helpful in guiding us towards what can be achieved, how we might be able to adjust our strategy, and ways to get around blockers. (Special thanks to our NHS Navigator, Lavinia!)

Finally, being part of the Accelerator has added considerable legitimacy to Hippo Labs and the Hippo Recaller platform, which is important in such a crowded marketplace. The recognised mark of DigitalHealth.London has given credibility to the product amongst people who might previously have been sceptical.

The DigitalHealth.London Accelerator has done exactly what we were hoping it would do. We are now further developed than we thought we would be, and have used the Accelerator platform to build strong relationships and even a product partnership! It is just good to have an experienced set of eyes to pass things under, and we wouldn’t have gotten to where we are without the Accelerator.

Dr Jonathan Sadler
Clinical Lead at Hippo Labs

The DigitalHealth.London Accelerator programme is funded by the UK Government via the UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF). It is delivered by the Health Innovation Network (HIN) South London in partnership with the Office of Life Sciences, CW+, Medicity, NHS England, the Mayor of London and the Levelling Up Fund.

For more information, please visit https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-
shared-prosperity-fund-prospectus.