SME of the Week: Feebris – An AI-powered examination platform for out-of-hospital care

Dr. Elina Naydenova, CEO of SME of the Week, Feebris, shares an update on the company’s impact to date and how they are contributing to the future of out-of-hospital care.

Feebris is a healthtech company on a mission to democratise access to healthcare. We want to ensure that no-one suffers from a treatable condition simply because they cannot access a doctor.

Healthcare today is hugely centralised and, unfortunately, delivered through a stretched infrastructure and workforce – the NHS has a shortfall of 43,000 nurses, 7,000 GPs alongside a further 122,000 vacant roles in adult social care. The consequences are long GP waiting times, delayed diagnosis and hospital backlogs – all compounded by the current pandemic. We believe that one of the most promising solutions to support universal, high-quality healthcare is in the use of AI solutions that enable more people to provide health care in the community, more accurately. To a achieve this, we need a system that enables anyone to both capture precise health measurements and triage health concerns quickly, easily and accurately to our resource-constrained health professionals. Something that’s yet to be achieved at scale.  

At Feebris, we have designed a solution to realise the full potential of heath monitoring in the community. Our app enables any user to become part of a powerful, decentralised health system and capture clinical-grade health measurements. In just 10 minutes, users can conduct a full clinical check-up, guided by the intuitive Feebris app, which connects to a range of medical devices to capture vital health measurements such as blood pressure and oxygen saturation. Our technology platform also provides personalised triage support ensuring patients are accurately escalated for further care only when it is required. GPs and other care teams can also access the same information and monitor patient’s health, effectively and over-time.  

This is the future of remote monitoring and healthcare – accessible, personalised and proactive. What makes our innovation unique is our data capture system – combining machine learning and behavioural science to deliver real time health measurement validation – processes that ensure users submit high quality measurements, alongside more accurate triage. Errors in data collection can cost millions in operational waste and avoidable hospitalisation. We recently published a report evidencing this for Respiratory Rate (RR) measurement, demonstrating a significant increase in accuracy and minimisation of bias as result of our AI-guided system. You can read more about this report and findings here.

We have proven that our technology is effective in two different contexts and patient groups – across elderly care in the UK and children’s health in urban India, we can evidence it: 

• reduces avoidable GP and urgent care, catches health issues earlier and increases GP and other providers’ capacity. In a c.1000 patient evaluation Feebris reduced avoidable GP escalations  from 12% to 2% and reduced avoidable 999 escalations by 23%;
• upskills and enables non-medical users to capture data of equivalent quality to clinicians.

The future of universal healthcare lies in transforming the provision of community care.  The cost saving potential for this innovation is huge – more effective community-based elderly care alone could reduce GP consultations by 27% and emergency admissions by 24% –  a saving of £1bn and 1.4bn respectively per year. Over the last three years Feebris have secured over £2m of funding, achieved medical device CE certification and contracts with Clinical Commissioning Groups across England. We’re now on a mission to build the capacity and capability of the community health workforce alongside supporting the establishment of gold-standards in out-of-hospital health monitoring – both from a technology and evidence perspective. We want to take some of the novel and embryonic ideas from the NHS, such as NHS@Home or Digital First to operationalise new standards of delivering care to patients in ways that are faster, safer, more cost effective and increase patient satisfaction.

The common thread across our experiences is that we must create solutions, technologies and services that can be agile and adapt to the capability and capacity needs of our health and social care systems in a way that is future proof – and ready for rapid scale. It’s increasingly clear that remote monitoring simply cannot scale without clinically validated AI solutions which enable non-clinical staff to measure and triage accurately and help focus critical clinical decision-making.

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Feebris is currently one of 20 digital health companies on the DigitalHealth.London Accelerator programme.

The DigitalHealth.London Accelerator is a collaborative programme funded by London’s three Academic Health Science Networks – UCL Partners, Imperial College Health Partners, and the Health Innovation Network, MedCity, CW+ and receives match funding from the European Regional Development Fund.