The HTN Now Awards 2021 has arrived. Today we’ll be announcing the winners and commended finalists across our seven categories that celebrate those teams and tech suppliers that have made a difference throughout the year.
We’ve already brought you six features starring the submissions we’ve had in each section, providing a little more detail on our entries, from rapid responses to COVID-19 through to remote monitoring and many more.
But now it’s the turn of our ‘SME Innovation’ award entrants to enjoy the limelight. Find out about some of the small and medium enterprises out there that have had a huge impact…
HEXTRANSFORMA tech to protect hips
HEXTRANSFORMA HEALTHCARE LIMITED’s submission to the ‘SME Innovation’ category is its development of an ‘AI-driven, machine learning technology’ called HexOrthopaed, a data-driven medical device that will ‘enable the efficient remote monitoring of orthopaedic patients’.
The company tells us it has ‘trained a machine learning model to use the data from wearable devices’ to ‘predict the three angles in hips, knees, and ankles more accurately than any research published currently’. Its aim is to provide a solution through ‘predictive technologies’ to improve patient care for sufferers of musculoskeletal conditions and even help identify movement disorders earlier.
Ultimately meant to benefit patients, healthcare professionals and researchers ‘in the field of clinical movement sciences’, its sensors and wearable devices can be used daily to gather data from movement in real, natural environments.
Oxford Heartbeat to help high-risk brain surgeries
Oxford Heartbeat has developed what it calls ‘an innovative medical software’ called PreSize® Neurovascular.
The technology digitises planning for high-risk brain surgeries, allowing clinicians to rehearse complex brain stenting procedures in virtual environments and ‘visualise’ individual patients’ anatomy in 3D and real-time.
Other notable features include, the digital health start-up tells us, the generation of ‘best-fit stents’ for patients, the exploration of different stents and the ability to be used as and when needed, allowing for surgical preparation ‘within five minutes’ for emergency situations.
Its aims are to substantially reduce surgical complications and improve patient outcome, while Oxford Heartbeat predicts that ‘with widespread implementation, PreSize® could benefit up to 50,000 stent surgery patients in the UK annually and up to 10 million globally’.
Malinko’s clinical system for healthcare
Malinko is a clinical system that helps healthcare organisations in community settings. The company tells us it provides valuable data that’s ‘captured by, held, and reported on’ and that it also ‘optimises caseload management and service and workforce planning’, ultimately offering ‘safer care at lower cost’.
As per the company, the system is currently allowing its 14 NHS partners to reduce clinical risk and improve productivity by 30%. It offers a three-part solution, including:
- Malinko Web, which helps office-based teams to schedule and manage the service using live, real-time views and data. The company says this enables clinicians to have the ‘transparency, visibility, and reporting’ to effectively manage.
- Malinko’s ‘unique clinical scheduling engine’, which assigns caseloads to clinicians and schedules patient visits in an ‘optimal way’.
- The Malinko Mobile App, which enables healthcare providers to ‘capture contemporaneous data and record patient-facing contact time’ with lone-worker protection features built-in.
The service “has brought district nursing into the 21st century,” according to Amanda Hobson, Lead Nurse at Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust and co-creator of Malinko.
While Mandy Davies, CCIO, Bolton NHS Foundation Trust, says: “Adopting Malinko has enabled our workforce to become more agile. With approximately the same workforce, in Jan 2019 – prior to Malinko – we carried out 15,500 visits. In Jan 2020, with Malinko, 19,587 visits were made. A 26% increase.”
Lavanya’s WeMa connects care in communities
Lavanya Plus Limited’s innovative offering is the digital care and remote monitoring platform WeMa, an ‘end-to-end managed service’ that aims to help both working and non-working informal carers source trusted, vetted social and community care services.
Recognising ‘the need for quick adoption and adaptation of digital technologies to fight the COVID-19 crisis’, Lanya tells us it has focused on the ‘unprecedented rise’ of informal carers in the UK and the challenge of sourcing trusted care services.
The ‘person-centred matching platform’ helps by removing ‘the friction of sourcing, payment and delivery of personalised social and community care services’.
It does this by clarifying the challenges, aims, budget, and ‘what workforce wellbeing services are applicable’, before providing:
- A ‘digital front-door’ accessed via web or mobile apps for service enquiries, real-time online chat or video consultation.
- A ‘concierge service’ from trained care managers that takes individuals through a digital risk assessment, through to the creation of a care plan.
- An E-commerce marketplace to source services from vetted service providers, e.g in-home elderly care, child support, mental wellbeing, physios, nutritionists.
- The option to use WeMa Plus business management tools to ‘automate, improve efficiency and transparency of service delivery’.
Florence fits social care workers to shifts
Florence is an app and platform that connects around 50,000 nurses and carers with available shifts at care homes across the UK
It says it provides ‘an innovative online marketplace’ that aids care homes in filling rota gaps, ‘cutting out agency middlemen’ and linking them up directly with the workforce. Any home can see a full digital record of who has worked, and the ratings system allows both staff and homes to rate each other after shifts, for transparency.
The company boasts 300% growth over the last year, and says it’s increased its coverage for the entirety of the UK.
During the pandemic, the app has added new features to ‘increase safety for homes booking in temporary workers’, which includes a viewable profile vaccine status icon that displays if the nurse or carer has had a vaccine dose, as well as dated COVID-19 test results and the ability to book workers into exclusive contracts.
The platform and app ‘greatly increases efficiency and reduces costs’ according to Florence, while the tech is based on an algorithm that matches an available shift to local workers and encourages the same staff to return again.
emteq labs excels in emotional analytics technology
Our next submission is from emteq labs, which offers an integrated platform that can translate the emotional state of a user into data.
The company says this approach unifies ‘virtual reality, biometrics and machine learning’ in a unique combination that can help ‘measure and translate biometric responses from immersive experiences for the benefit of emotions research’.
The results can be used in marketing and academia, as well as for mental health interventions, with clinical trials for P-TSD, social anxiety, facial paralysis and depression planned over the next 18 months.
But emteq says its ‘primary focus’ is on health technology and developing a platform that will ‘enable VRET (Virtual Reality Exposure Therapies) for mental health improvement through objective measures of response’.
Developers of health, wellbeing and training simulations based on exposure therapy will find it can ‘offer objective measurement of success’ and the ‘ability to automatically regulate exposure intensity, enabling self-management for patients/users and improved wellbeing for populations and employees’.
Streets Heaver Healthcare Computing
Streets Heaver has devised Compucare, innovative hospital management software. Described as a ‘leading hospital information system’, it’s continuously developed in-house by a specialised team, so that the technology is a ‘future-proof’ healthcare solution.
Compucare acts as a ‘central hub of data’, transforming how healthcare organisations ‘share, synchronise, and manage their data’ throughout the entire care continuum.
According to Streets Heaver, its software is currently being used hundreds of hospitals and clinics – including 19 of the top 30 earning NHS Trusts for private patient care.
Last year, the company says it introduced a ‘modern and intuitive interface and improved data structure’ and developed new features including E-Discharge and E-Prescribing. The electronic prescriptions can increase safety by automatically warning and preventing invalid drug combinations, while medication is digitally cross-referenced in both the prescribing and dispensing process. It has also launched specialist apps for clinicians and patients.
HN and L2S2 combine for AI-guided coaching
There’s not one but two health tech SMEs in this entry, as Health Navigator Ltd and L2S2 Ltd partnered up to develop a ‘clinically evidenced new model of care’ that’s intended to help patients with chronic diseases to stay out of hospital.
The collaborative effort has resulted in targeted and AI-guided clinical coaching to support patients with poorly controlled conditions. By the application of AI to live data, healthcare staff can identify patients with the ‘highest risk of an unplanned hospital admission’.
HN informs us of the stats behind the creation of its innovation, Artificial Intelligence Clinical Coaching (AICC) technology – in acute healthcare, it says, less than 1% of the population occupies more than half of all hospital bed-days, with many having poorly controlled chronic conditions. If better controlled, the need for multiple episodes of care and heavy NHS costs could be prevented.
HN’s ‘targeted coaching’ tech is intended to ‘build patients’ capability to self-manage’ and identify those most able to benefit from the service, earlier on in their clinical journey, for swifter interventions.
Coaching with specialist nurses to control illnesses is combined with remote monitoring from HN’s technology partner, L2S2 Ltd to create a high tech ‘virtual ward’. The companies’ goal is to now ‘embed AICC as routine NHS practice within five years’.
HN tells us that a large, multicentre, high-quality and randomised-controlled trial of around 1,800 patients demonstrated that the AICC approach ‘saves the NHS approximately £2,000/patient, with return on investment of 200%’, as well as releasing bed capacity.
Hospital Services Limited
Hospitals Services Limited (HSL) can provide integrated and secure virtual consultations with workflows that are ‘identical’ to in-hospital consultations.
HSL Telehealth has supported five NHS trusts’ ‘face-to-face communications’ in response to the pandemic. But recognising that a consultation can ‘only be partly effective’ if it takes place ‘in isolation from the data that the clinician needs to make informed decisions’, and aware of security and privacy concerns for staff and patients, the team produced a prototype of an integrated and secure service.
Offering integration with the Patient Administration System, telehealth-enabled medical devices and the Electronic Care Record, HLS tells us it presented a working system by April 2020. Its first integrated secure virtual consultation services were then delivered in August 2020, with full approval for the service by October.
HSL and the Trusts it’s working with believe the innovation can convert 30% of all outpatient sessions to virtual consultations.
Keep an eye out for the award winners’ and commended entrants’ video ceremony via our Twitter account @health1tech.
