Two Accelerator alumni join up to advance remote patient monitoring

Huma, alumnus of the DigitalHealth.London Accelerator programme, has acquired another alumnus company, iPLATO Healthcare, in order to advance digital-first delivery of care and remote patient monitoring for NHS patients.

Huma’s digital ‘hospitals at home’ helps care for patients across the England NHS, Wales, Germany, and the UAE, and evidence shows the technology can help almost double clinical capacity, reduce readmission rates by a third, and reduce costs whilst providing safe, high-quality care. iPLATO’s patient engagement software covers a network of 26.6 million patients across nearly 3,000 NHS primary care organisations and their myGP app is one of the most downloaded medical apps in the UK. The two companies will continue to operate independently but will combine their expertise to enable more proactive, predictive and personalised care for patients in a joined-up service across primary and secondary care.

This new partnership reflects the findings of DigitalHealth.London’s Driving Digital report which identified remote monitoring as one of the five key opportunities of digital health in the next five years. We started a conversation with NHS and social care staff, industry, patients and academics, and they concluded that digital tools that aid remote patient care have scope to improve outcomes, experience and safety, and that the sector’s remote digital offering must continue to grow to meet the needs of patients to manage their journey though the health system and better self-manage.

Dan Vahdat, CEO & Founder of Huma, said: “We are part of the movement using remote patient monitoring and digital biomarkers to transform healthcare. We’ve already shown how we can help clinicians care for more people whilst offering greater reassurance and oversight from monitoring even when patients are away from the clinic. But there is still so much more we can do. We want to introduce digital screening and our peer-reviewed cardiovascular and depression risk scores to give patients even more insight into their own health. Adding these capabilities to iPLATO’s patient engagement expertise gives us a fantastic opportunity to make a significant difference in primary care and help more patients to live longer, fuller lives.”

Tobias Alpsten, CEO of iPLATO Healthcare, said: “We are excited to offer leading remote patient monitoring capability from Huma to our primary care partners. We recently launched patient questionnaires on the myGP platform to enable patient data to be coded directly into the patients’ medical records. Combining tools like this with digital biomarkers can help create a world where we can tackle the biggest killers of our time – cancer, heart disease and now, Covid-19. We see a time when data collection highlights people at high risk, so those individuals can be offered personalised screening, treatment, advice, support and continual follow-up remotely – even alerting clinicians when patients need to be seen in-person. Bringing our patient questionnaires together with Huma’s remote patient monitoring capability means that this future is not too far away.”

Find out more about the partnership here.

Huma and iPLATO are alumni of the DigitalHealth.London Accelerator programme.

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