Flok Health: helping Get Britain Working through AI-operated physiotherapy 

Posted on by DigitalHealth.London

Flok Health has developed and deployed the UK’s first AI-operated NHS physiotherapy clinic, delivering personalised treatment at a population scale, with no waiting list. Flok Health are a CQC-approved healthcare provider, and their software medical device can fully automate clinical decision-making for triage and treatment. They contract with NHS trusts to deliver end-to-end care pathways.  

Understanding the scale of the musculoskeletal challenge and its impact on society

Musculoskeletal (MSK) pain, and specifically low back pain, is the largest cause of disability in the UK and across the world. It is also among the leading reasons for sick leave. 1 in 3 adults in the UK have at least one significant episode of back pain per year, and half of that population seeks healthcare for the pain.  

The longer someone suffers with pain, the more difficult it becomes to manage, and the more likely it is to have a long-term impact on quality of life and workforce participation. This means that waiting times in MSK services are not just debilitating for patients; they directly lead to poorer outcomes and more sickness absence due to pain as patients deteriorate. The scale and complexity of the MSK challenge are highlighted in the government’s recent Get Britain Working white paper on economic productivity, with a clear call to action for changing treatment approaches for the good of society. 

Before Flok, delivering MSK care pathways required unscalable 1:1 contact with clinicians, contributing to long waiting times and compromised care. Flok radically improves access to care – back pain patients can now have immediate access to world-class physiotherapy and start recovering straight away. The Flok team have seen that the 24/7 availability of their digital clinic makes it easier for people to stay in work while they receive treatment, particularly in jobs where there is less flexibility to attend healthcare appointments during normal working hours. By making it easy for these patients to get great care when they need it, Flok can manage their pain early to help keep them healthy and working. 

Taking inspiration from elite sport to address the MSK crisis

Flok Health was co-founded by Finn Stevenson, who studied medicine and musculoskeletal medicine at university, with a particular focus on spine conditions. He also spent three years as a full-time athlete, with professional physiotherapy and medical care on tap. These experiences demonstrated how having immediate access to gold-standard care could resolve MSK problems very quickly; a stark contrast to his struggles managing back pain after leaving the elite sport environment.  

This perspective helped Finn realise the fundamental challenge in the NHS when it comes to these high-volume community pathways. With his co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Ric da Silva, he set out three years ago to design a new form of healthcare delivery model that could bring gold-standard individualised treatment to patients on a huge scale.  

One of the challenges Flok has faced is in explaining to the market that this approach to treatment is now possible – digital MSK solutions historically have very much been adjuncts to regular care, without transforming the traditional pathway. Recent technological advances, including Flok’s own work, mean that extremely safe, personalised care can now be delivered with no waiting list – with Flok already demonstrating the effectiveness of this approach across a number of regions. 

Working with DigitalHealth.London to gain a foothold in the capital and continue their growth 

Before taking part in the Digital Health London Accelerator programme, Flok Health had no NHS partnerships within London. Their aim was to use the programme to build relationships within the London ecosystem, better understand the market for current and future products, and to hopefully formalise at least one London-based partnership.  

Through completing the Accelerator, they achieved all their goals, establishing two commercial partnerships with NHS trusts and continuing to learn through the programme.  

Flok are now operating in multiple NHS regions and treating thousands of patients. Feedback from patients has been excellent, with Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) and Patient-Reported Experience Measures (PREMs) collection showing that >75% of patients credit their treatment with improving or resolving their symptoms, and 77% of patients report that their experience with Flok was equivalent or better than face-to-face treatment with a regular physiotherapist.  

The staff in their partner services have also seen positive improvements in their work, reporting that they now have a more balanced clinical caseload (previously dominated by spinal patients) and a noticeable impact from a reduction in overall strain in the service.  

What’s next for Flok?

Having started in back pain, the Flok Health team are now training their system more broadly to manage a larger number of high-volume MSK pathways, for example, hip and knee osteoarthritis (OA), in addition to building non-MSK services, such as a women’s pelvic health clinic. Flok are working with a growing number of NHS trusts to roll out AI-operated clinics across the UK and is excited to be delivering world-class care to a rapidly growing number of patients nationally.  

Learn more about Flok Health by visiting their website and connecting on LinkedIn.

Flok Health is part of cohort 8 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.

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