DigitalHealth.London Spotlight: Hippo Labs

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 Hippo Labs.

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

Preventative care, such as immunisations, screenings and long-term condition management, is vital for people with or susceptible to long-term conditions. However, legacy systems remain, which makes effective preventative care challenging at an organisational level. Completing administrative tasks (e.g., patient bookings) associated with this care equates to thousands of hours per year, which could be better spent on direct patient work. 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 planning/organisation work of preventative care and optimises the use of clinical teams. The platform plugs into the patient care record, analyses the entirety of the record to understand the care needs of both the 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 outcomes for both patients and the practice.

What is the history of your company?

The Hippo Recaller platform was designed out of need by Sachin Gupta, while working as a practice manager for a group of practices in South-East London. The vast amount of proactive care targets (such as the QOF and IIF schemes) and lack of modernisation in systems meant that this important area of medicine was hard to achieve and required huge amounts of manual effort. Having spent several years piloting the platform locally, we’ve found that our original thesis of automating workload helps to improve the uptake of long-term care management services and streamlines workload for all. We’re now starting to expand outside of South East London to work with practices all across the country.

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

The Hippo Recaller platform has been used by multiple practices, PCNs, federations and third-sector providers (e.g. Prostate Cancer UK). Where implemented fully, practices are now using Hippo as the primary recall method for patients across multiple different target areas. In one case study with a PCN in South East London, we’ve found that practices that use Hippo were able to improve their uptake of diabetes services by 2.5 times compared with practices not using the platform. We’ve worked with Prostate Cancer UK to customise the platform to meet their goals of widening the screening net for men at risk of prostate cancer, without increasing the workload on practices.

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

Hippo Labs is now open to working with a wider range of PCNs and practices – we want to bring intelligent automation to as many patients and providers as we can! We’ve also got some amazing features up our sleeves – check out our blog to keep up to date on the latest releases!

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

The DigitalHealth.London Accelerator has allowed Hippo to understand how to work effectively with the NHS and has enabled us to build great partnerships with providers and commissioners. We also met the team at Hero Health through the programme – Hippo now integrates with Hero enabling great features like ‘self-booking links’ benefiting our practices and their patients.

Do you have any advice for aspiring digital health companies?

The NHS is complex and has so many different people doing different things – really consider the applications of your product and how different users might approach it. You may need to perform research with people you don’t have easy access to but once you start learning like this, you’ll never want to stop!

Any asks for the audience?

Interested in an automated patient recaller? Reach out to us!

Hippo Labs 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.