Innovate UK grants £1m to help 'digitise medicine'

New technology which can “unlock” medication records has been awarded £1 million in fresh funding by Innovate UK.

Developed by UK-based start-up CONNECT Care, the technology takes data that is currently siloed in medical records and puts it into contextualised, personalised information that helps patients and health professionals make links between medicines and their impact on an individual’s wider health.

This online platform will use a patient’s NHS number to make this information available.

The technology will be developed and brought to market thanks to an injection of £1 million in fresh grant funding from Innovate UK. The funding was awarded in two phases, with £615,000 invested in late 2022, followed by an additional injection of half a million pounds £495,000 in recent weeks. 

Patient records are either hard to access or kept in paper format. Based on an individual’s actual medical records, CONNECT Care’s technology uses existing prescription data held by GPs, pharmacists, and other health teams. Via a software platform, they can then provide crucial insights to patients and care teams, such as whether a new prescription may increase a patient’s likelihood of falling. Or if a certain combination of medicines may cause dehydration, meaning a patient will need to drink more fluids.

Through the process, it aims to ‘digitise the brain of a pharmacist’ and help people reduce additional health complications which poor access to medicines insights creates.

An early version of this technology won the recent #CareHackathon at Digital Health REWIRED - an innovation competition to design new solutions to improve social care outcomes.

This new integration of their technology builds on the start-up’s wider work to digitise medicines and create the first comprehensive, single source of truth on medicines data for patients and health professionals.

Issa Dasu-Patel, CEO of ConnectCare, said: “Prescribed medicines are the most common intervention in healthcare; there are billions of medicines being taken by millions of people every year. But medicines have been excluded from the digital health revolution. We are joining the dots and unlocking the vast benefits that better insights on medicines can bring to patients and health professionals. Using just an NHS number, we can create personalised, contextualised insights that will help people stay well.  We’re so grateful to receive this additional Innovate UK backing so we can scale this application of our software and move a step closer towards creating a single source of truth for medicines data in the UK.”