Why chronic disease monitoring is stuck in the past and how Mana Medical are helping to fix it

DigitalHealth.London Launchpad company Mana Medical has announced the launch of their Minimum Viable Product (MVP), a self-management app that is designed to help people with rheumatological conditions manage the symptoms of rheumatic pain and fatigue.

In this blog, Co-Founder and CMO Emma Dyson shares how the company aims to empower individuals by offering personalised, data-driven insights to help manage their health journey more effectively.

The current picture

Chronic conditions – like diabetes, liver disease and rheumatoid arthritis –  account for 70% of UK healthcare spending. Despite this, the approach to managing most of these conditions remains completely outdated. Patients are being underserved by devices that feel like they belong in a museum. Fragmented data, outdated systems, and a disconnected healthcare experience define some patients’ daily reality, with less than a third of people in the UK satisfied with the NHS.

Current approaches still lean heavily on in-clinic blood tests and imaging—methods that offer only a snapshot of the patient’s experience at a single point in time. This narrow perspective fails to capture the dynamic, day-to-day challenges of living with chronic conditions. 

Yet, we know from other chronic conditions that advancements in innovative tools and continuous data can shift this paradigm, delivering precision and personalisation to monitoring and therapeutics. The transformation of diabetes care, for example, offers a powerful lesson in healthcare innovation. The shift from routine finger pricks to continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) did more than eliminate a daily inconvenience—it ushered in a new frontier of care for patients.

These monitoring devices laid the foundation for artificial pancreas systems, which now calculate and deliver precise insulin doses in real-time. Elsewhere, the National Early Warning Score (NEWS), a standardised system for assessing deteriorating patients in hospitals, was introduced in 2012. It provided an objective, continuous measure of vital signs and symptoms in unwell patients. NEWS achieved what once seemed impossible: a 20% reduction in sepsis mortality and a 50% decrease in hospital cardiac arrest rates. Even seemingly simple changes in healthcare monitoring can yield remarkable results.

Similarly, consumer wellness companies have leveraged advancements in wearable technology to generate clinical insights, enabling at-home monitoring and personalised care. Whoop recently announced a novel biomarker to help catch early pre-eclampsia, and Apple have also added a single lead ECG on their Apple Watch. This can detect Atrial Fibrillation in 84% of cases in comparison to a 12-lead ECG. The potential impact of these products on patients with chronic conditions highlights a significant opportunity to leverage existing devices to enhance existing care pathways. 

The Emerging Frontier: Digital Biomarkers

These success stories illuminate a crucial insight: when we approach conditions from a fresh perspective and implement standardised, continuous monitoring, we can transform patient outcomes. For these solutions to work at-scale, they must be affordable, mass-market and unobtrusive. It is important that they also deliver a continuous stream of objective, clinically validated data for healthcare providers. With the right product and tooling around data, providers can produce higher-quality healthcare, at-scale.

With over 95% of UK residents owning a smartphone and growing adoption of wearable devices, there has been an explosion of data around individuals’ health. By finding meaningful ways to utilise this new influx of data, we have the potential to monitor patients’ chronic conditions like never before. By integrating cutting-edge technologies, wearable devices have the potential to accurately reflect the highly variable experiences of patients with chronic conditions, empowering clinicians to tailor care to individual needs. This is also just the beginning; the digital biomarker market is expected to grow from $5.6BN today to $35.8BN in 2035.

The monitoring of rheumatological conditions is ripe for this new wave of digital-first solutions. Unlike diabetes with its clear blood glucose markers, rheumatological conditions present a more complex challenge. Current monitoring methods rely heavily on subjective assessments and infrequent clinical visits. Even when inflammatory markers are measured, the results often tell an incomplete story—patients can experience significant symptoms even with normal test results.

This monitoring challenge directly impacts treatment efficacy. Currently, only 40% of patients respond to certain medications, highlighting the urgent need for more accurate monitoring and precise treatment approaches. While traditional blood tests lack the sensitivity and specificity needed, recent technological advances—including AI, computer vision, and wearables—offer new possibilities. In rheumatological conditions, where joint health and movement are so closely linked to disease activity, these digital tools could provide critical insights into disease progression and flare-up risks, revolutionising treatment pathways.

Join our beta community

The future of healthcare monitoring extends far beyond data collection—it’s about empowering patients to take control of their health journey. At Mana Medical, we are seeking to shape this future, as we prepare to launch our Minimum Viable Product (MVP). 

Our first product is a self-management app for people with rheumatological conditions. It combines personal health data collected by your existing wearable device, patient symptom inputs and Machine Learning to provide tailored daily physical activity recommendations and interventions to mitigate symptoms of rheumatic pain and fatigue. This data will allow clinicians to more effectively manage and monitor their patients’ health.  

We’re seeking passionate patients and clinical champions who share our vision for better rheumatological care and are willing to provide feedback on our MVP.

If you are interested, please complete the form below and we will be in touch to let you know how you can help.

To learn more about Mana Medical, get in touch with the team at support@manamedical.co.uk 

Mana Medical is part of the seventh cohort of the DigitalHealth.London Launchpad programme.

DigitalHealth.London Launchpad 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 and the Mayor of London.

For more information, please visit https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-
shared-prosperity-fund-prospectus.