A health tech start up aiming to leverage visual data differently has raised £250k in a recently closed pre-seed funding round.
The company, ISLA, has partnered with Central London Community Healthcare to focus on leveraging visual data to improve end of life care and dermatology services and to utilise the £250k to develop a ‘visual patient record’.
With a growing demand for health services and focus on manning care closer to home the start up believes there is an opportunity to make better use of photographs and video in delivering remote healthcare at scale.
The startup is running pilots with Central London Community Health Trust, Wirral Borough Council and Wirral Community Health Trust to build a platform which allows visual data to be ‘curated, structured and presented’ to clinicians to support decision making. The pilots will then be assessed in order to understand the benefits and challenges of wider adoption of visual health data flows.
The pilots will focus on providing front line teams in the community with the tools to capture and review health information, whether reporting on pressure sores through to short videos of the home for planning home alterations. It aims to make it easier for Health and Social Care workers to access a consistent visual record across existing organisational boundaries. The visual record will be owned and edited by patients and service users, supporting independence whilst maintaining a close connection with relevant clinicians.
Pete Hansell, Co-Founder “We are thrilled to have the support we need to focus on building a valuable product. With the increasing capabilities of the phones in all of our pockets, there is a real opportunity to provide a much more complete picture of a person’s health and care needs.”
“High quality visual data is key in providing the context needed for remote decision making, both long term and at the point of triage.”
The platform allows for the secure capture of visual data on personal devices, with built in controls on the quality of images and videos being submitted. The data is then categorised and structured to allow for review by a clinician or team.
Co-founder, James Jurkiewicz, who is from a computer vision and artificial intelligence background, sees significant potential in the application of this within visual health data once sufficiently high quality data sets have been collected.
