DigitalHealth.London Spotlight: Aide Health

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 Aide Health.

What is the challenge you are addressing and why is it important?

There are 26 million people in the UK and roughly 200 million in the US living with one or more long-term conditions. Aide focuses on the challenge of comorbidity: people with two or more long-term conditions. This happens over half of the time, and we believe it to be critically underserved. Aide is designed to be one holistic platform that ultimately supports any combination of long-term conditions.

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

Aide is a digital service that helps patients and their clinicians better understand and manage chronic disease. We focus on the missing piece of healthcare delivery: comorbidity. Using conversational AI, Aide has short, daily conversations with patients to help them self-care. Insights are sent to a cloud-based clinician platform to support decision-making with real-world patient data and insights with less dependency on the patient’s recall ability.

Today, Aide supports Asthma, Type-2 Diabetes and Hypertension and is working towards supporting the top ten long-term conditions in the next two years.

What is the history of your company?

Aide was founded in 2021 after 12 months of R&D and validation with the UK and US healthcare systems, including the NHS, pharma, insurers, charities and patient groups. A pilot was launched in May 2022 to support asthma and type 2 diabetes, with outcomes which led to Aide being commercialised in multiple primary care networks. In mid-2023, Aide was awarded an NIHR grant to support the development of a pathway for hypertension, which included participation from the Patient Voices group of the British Heart Foundation. In March 2024, we published the outcomes of our year-long partnership with Suffolk Primary Care.

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

Aide has been commissioned across multiple primary care networks and has just completed the outcomes report from their first customer, Suffolk Primary Care.

The results demonstrated an ability to stratify risk, improve adherence, and reduce clinical time and risk of hospitalisation:

• 71.8% retention after 30 days (22x sector average)
• Achieved 73.3% avg. medicine adherence.
• Avg. 4 conversations completed per patient/day oldest user aged 76, median age 50
• +8.4% avg. patient confidence change
• 40.6% conversion from invitation to download.
• Engaged those in area classifications including ‘hard pressed ageing workers’, ‘challenged diversity’, ‘rural tenants’, ‘outer city hardship’ and ‘urban professionals and families’.

Translating into saving time and reducing hospitalisation risk:

Potential 332.3 hours and £19.2k saved per thousand asthma patients via asynchronous education.

Reducing the risk of potential hospitalisation by uncovering hidden medicine behaviours:

Aide identified that 50% of patients did not have an asthma action plan (AAP), which patients overuse their reliever inhaler (>2 times per week) and for what reason, and provided education on reliever and preventer inhaler use.

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

To support 100 million lives globally, and become one of the most influential companies in reversing the unsustainable trajectory of chronic disease.

In the next 12 months, Aide will add a minimum of two conditions including COPD and CVD, continue to support patients and clinicians in the NHS, and start working with Pharmaceutical companies.

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

DigitalHealth.London has helped us better understand and navigate the NHS — sharpening our proposition and outcomes, and identifying the right people in the NHS who could benefit from our technology.

Do you have any advice for aspiring digital health companies?

Involve patients as early as possible in the development of your technology. Get your product into the hands of people as quickly as possible.

Any asks for the audience?

If you are in the NHS and interested in improving the patient’s ability to self-care, reducing utilisation and the risk of hospitalisation, we would be happy to hear from you.

Aide Health 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.