DigitalHealth.London Spotlight: Abtrace

Every week, we shine a spotlight on one of our DigitalHealth.London companies, founders, or NHS fellows. Today, we are excited to feature our current DigitalHealth.London Accelerator company Abtrace.

What is the problem you are trying to solve and why is it important?

By 2050, the population aged over 60 will double to 2.1 billion people. More than half of these will have a long-term chronic disease which accounts for 70% of health expenditure. While healthcare budgets continue to rise (representing $10 trillion globally), life expectancy gains have not kept pace. The gap between lifespan and health span is also becoming wider, leading the system to become unsustainably expensive. Patients are finding the quality of care provided inconsistent, while staff find their workloads repetitive and exhausting.

Though care has shifted from bricks-and-mortar to virtual telehealth providers, this is still a reactive process and does not remove the need or expense of staff. Healthcare needs to shift towards a more proactive approach allowing earlier detection of disease and avoidance of preventable conditions.

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

Abtrace has built software that integrates into multiple electronic health record systems and wearable devices to run AI algorithms on clinical data. Covering 3 million patients in the NHS, the software identifies patients who need interventions, contacts them for information, arranges consultation with appropriate clinicians, ensures all interventions are done and calculates the efficiency and quality of care in real-time, for every patient, every day.

What is the history of your company?

Abtrace was founded with the mission to deliver personalised care at a population scale. With a strong team of practising clinicians, data scientists and regulatory experts we are promoting a transformation in health systems to embrace automation and data-driven care at scale to free up time to focus on communicating with the patient. In 2022, we launched our first product to market which is grounded in existing clinical workflows, powered by granular clinical data, and fully integrated into existing Electronic Health Records (EHR).

What successes have you had so far from successful pilots/trials/contracts?

Abtrace has built healthcare system integrations that cover 96% of the UK population, extracting real-time patient comprehensive longitudinal health records daily that train on a unique primary care dataset from cradle to grave. This allows the delivery of AI models using structured and unstructured data (including clinical Large Language Models). All of this is underpinned by medical device certification with UKCA marked Software as a Medical Device.

We are delivering our product to over 250 GP Practices across the UK supporting care provision to more than 3 million patients.

What are your future goals? What does success look like?

Our vision is an automated, self-learning care system where we can provide personalised care, delivered at a population scale – where predictive, preventative and proactive approaches keep people healthy and out of the hospital to deliver a global impact for patients and healthcare systems. It’s a vision that has been proven in the NHS and our ambition is to scale it globally, to partner and to reach as many of us around the world as possible.

How has your time on the DigitalHealth.London Accelerator helped you in achieving these?

The support from DigitalHealth.London has been paramount for our improved understanding of the market, helping us reshape our value proposition to different stakeholders and promoting our solutions next to relevant customer segments.

Do you have any advice for aspiring digital health companies?

Trust and stay truthful to your mission. It will point you in the right direction in moments of uncertainty. Tackle your biggest challenges upfront.

Any asks for the audience?

If you want to automate and transform your chronic disease recall at GP, PCN or ICS level, please get in touch.

Abtrace is currently in Cohort 7 of the DigitalHealth.London Accelerator programme.

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.