Huma has bought iPLATO Healthcare, whose patient engagement software covers a network of 26.6 million patients across nearly 3,000 NHS primary care organisations and whose myGP app is one of the most downloaded medical apps in the UK.
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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.
Huma’s technology has almost doubled clinical capacity through virtual wards and helped clinicians spot and reprioritise nearly 10% of their cardiac surgery patients on waiting lists who were deteriorating. However, remote patient monitoring is still not used widely in primary care. Huma, whose technology is used across the UK, Europe, US, Asia, and the Middle East to power ‘hospitals at home’ and decentralised clinical trials, is planning to change that.
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.”
iPLATO has over 10 years of experience in primary care engagement and has a strong user base. Almost 2.4 million people in England use the myGP app to manage their health – reducing unnecessary appointments, administrative tasks, and pressure on primary care; including medication reminders, tracking of vital signs, and ordering of prescriptions. iPLATO has also been instrumental in increasing uptake of NHS services, including IAPT services, cancer screenings and health checks, resulting in up to 65% higher uptake of services communicated through the myGP platform.
Tobias Alpsten, CEO of iPLATO Healthcare, added: “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.”
