DigitalHealth.London Spotlight: Bingli

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 Bingli.

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

The NHS faces a pressing challenge in meeting the increasing demands of a growing and ageing population while grappling with a shortage of personnel. This issue is particularly pronounced in emergency departments (EDs), where patient expectations for quick and high-quality care are at an all-time high. ED attendance, waiting times, and ambulance offload times have reached unprecedented levels, necessitating a focused effort to maximize efficiency throughout the patient journey. By optimising internal processes within EDs, we can significantly reduce the time required to make crucial clinical decisions. Ensuring the safety and efficiency of these processes is vital for enhancing patient experience, promoting patient safety, and maintaining a smooth hospital flow.

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

Most decisions in healthcare are based on data collected by asking patients questions during the history taking. This is time-consuming and administrative heavy.

Bingli asks the right questions in advance using the most accurate AI. Patients can answer at their own pace, in their language (+18 languages).

By asking the right questions we help patients get the right care by the right caregiver at the right time in the most time and cost-efficient way. It generates a list of differential diagnoses and other actionable insights (e.g. triage scores) based on responses patients give, resulting in more productive and cost-efficient consultations.

What is the history of your company?

The Bingli founders (a medical doctor and a medical communication specialist) witnessed on several occasions how communication between patients and doctors is inefficient. They decided to develop a platform to improve this communication because good healthcare starts with good communication. The development started with clinical insights and medical reasoning and then looked at the most appropriate technical solution (and not the other way around). We build a proprietary and most accurate differential diagnostic model powered by AI that mimics the way doctors think to improve history taking.

We believe our solution can bring back empathy and efficiency in healthcare.

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

• 20% reduction in ED throughput time: reduced waiting times and increased capacity/availability of services
• 20% less time spent on administration (paperless, fully coded/structured information: Snomed CT, ICD10, ensuring EHR integration or PDF export)
• Cost reduction (less unnecessary technical investigations, less need for translators as Bingli is multilingual)
• Complete patient files with coded/structured data results in valuable datasets that can be used for analysis, decision making, training, identification of candidates for clinical studies
• 90% diagnostic accuracy
• Empowered patients: patients can answer questions in their language (full multilingual support), taking into account health literacy
• 30% of patients triaged/oriented to an appropriate level of care

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

In the short term, we want to implement Bingli in as many EDs in the UK to complement and enhance the ongoing efforts to improve patient care in UK healthcare. As we have developed a disease-agnostic tool, we want to grow from EDs to other departments in hospitals and outside hospitals such as nurse advice lines and telehealth.

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

As a non-UK company, getting to understand and navigate the NHS and getting introduced to the right people will for sure help us in achieving our goal of getting substantial commercial activity in the UK.

Do you have any advice for aspiring digital health companies?

In your entrepreneurial journey, never hesitate to speak up about your innovative product. The more you share, the more you open doors to support, collaboration, and invaluable feedback. Remember, visibility is key to fostering connections and unlocking opportunities that can propel your startup to new heights. Embrace openness as a strength, not a vulnerability.

Any asks for the audience?

Introductions to decision makers to adopt innovation in EDs, other hospital departments and other healthcare services.

Bingli 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.