It’s that time of year again – we’re delighted to share the winners of the Health Tech Awards 2023, sponsored by CCube Solutions.

Almost 200 judges from across the NHS have read all about the innovative digital health projects and programmes from our finalists and cast their vote. With 15 categories spanning topics from best use of data and best use of digital in primary care, to the best solution supporting elective care recovery and best use of AI and automation tools, we’ve got plenty of best practice and inspiration to share with you to help with your own digital initiatives.

HTN would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who has supported the programme, the fantastic judges, and the super people announcing the winners in the ceremony tonight…

So without further ado, meet our winners!

Opening Address by: Dr Shera Chok, chair and co-founder of the Shuri Network and a GP in East London

Winner announcements by

• Dr Dan Bunstone, GP, clinical director of Warrington Innovation Network and chair of NHS Confed’s digital and data group
• Dr Osman Bhatti, GP and chief clinical information officer for North East London ICB
• Dr Penny Kechagioglou, chief clinical information officer and deputy chief medical officer at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire
• Samantha Prime, research fellow at University of Plymouth’s Centre for Health Technology
• Dr Andrew Stradling, chief medical officer for NHS London Procurement Partnership
• Satya Raghuvanshi, vice president of clinical at Accurx
• Daria Markova, head of marketing and sustainability lead at Open Medical
• Mr Krishna Moorthy, consultant surgeon and founder of Alvie Health
• Natasha Scott, adult mental health system convener at Surrey Heartland ICB
• Adam Wisdish, digital programme manager at Nottingham University Hospitals
• Rachel Fox, executive vice-president of Altera Digital Health UK
• Veronica Blanco Gutierrez, midwife and PhD candidate in digital health at University of Bristol
• Kishan Karia, advanced special pharmacist for care homes at University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust
• Reena Pradhananga, LMS course manager at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
• James Driver, digital innovation manager at Berkshire West, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire ICB

Meet the winners…

Best Health Tech Solution of the Year

Islacare took the top spot in this category, with their solution to transform remote diagnosis of neurological conditions.

Working closely with clinicians, Islacare has implemented the Isla visual record, designed to create a seamless mechanism for patients, family members and carers to provide regular updates on the progress of a patient’s neurological condition. With treatment of conditions such as epilepsy previously relying on the patient attending regular appointments in order to keep clinicians up-to-date, this web-based platform offers a fully automated progress for clinical teams to collect information including video footage, images and patient-reported outcomes.

Congratulations also to our runner-up, ImproveWell, with their real-time feedback solution for continuous improvement and everyday innovation in health and care.

Read more about the entries in this category here.

Best Use of Digital in Primary Care

Congratulations to our winners for this category, Inhealthcare Limited, who took the prize with their Blood Pressure @ Home service.

The service enables patients to monitor their blood pressure from home and send in digital readings to their clinical team. It sees patients most at risk of hospitalisation or stroke identified through a risk stratification pyramid and actively monitored using the Inhealthcare platform. After taking their reading, patients can submit it to the service via app, email, text or phone call. In Surrey Heartlands, the service supports an estimated 125,900 people living with poorly-controlled diagnosed or undiagnosed hypertension.

Our runner-up is Pogo Digital Healthcare, with Tailored Talks: a digital platform offering personalised support for people living with long COVID.

More information can be found here.

Major Project Go Live

Our winners in this category are Nottingham University Hospitals and Nervecentre, with an EPMA (electronic prescribing and medicines administration) deployment. 

The deployment formed part of a wider frontline digitisation partnership with Nervecentre aiming to improve safety, efficiency and sustainability from paperless working along with providing real-time insights into prescribing activities. It saw the solution deployed across 101 wards and 1390 beds, with Nervecentre-enabled iPhones and iPads used to record observations, track fluid balances, view test results and sepsis alerts, and also for task management, messaging, clinical noting and bed management. Since EPMA go-live, these devices can also be used to administer medications and access patient records at any time of day from any location.

Another service from Nottingham took the runner-up spot – the Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Local Maternity and Neo-natal Service, with their digital maternity information system replacement programme. Congratulations to them!

Read more about this category here.

Most Promising Pilot

In this category, we congratulate our winners King’s College London, King’s College Hospital and Ensono, for their web app designed to help paramedics and doctors triage patients who suffer cardiac arrest outside of a hospital.

Following research to develop the MIRACLE2 algorithm, which provides a neurological risk score to assess risk of brain damage following an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, the Ensono team worked with academics from King’s College London to develop an app capable of incorporating the algorithm. The app uses seven variables to predict poor neurological outcomes in six months, with a further two tools added to help clinicians in diagnosing and personalising treatment – one classify cardiogenic shock into one of five classes based on severity, and one calculating the probability of a culprit coronary lesion.

Well done also to our runners up, Cambridge and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust and Healthy.io, with their work to improve outcomes for patients requiring wound management in community care.

Read more about our finalists’ work here.

Digitising Patient Services

Royal Papworth Hospital and DrDoctor took the winning spot in this category, with their digital patient engagement portal to digitise patient communications in the outpatient department. 

The Royal Papworth Hospital project team worked with DrDoctor to ensure that all letter correspondence throughout the patient journey could be digitised, with triggers for a letter automatically resulting in an SMS message or email sent to the patient with a link to the patient portal. The trust notes that did-not-attend rates have fallen across outpatient clinics also lists environmental benefits such as saving 108,000g of carbon emissions so far.

Our runner up for Digitising Patient Services is Alvie Health, working with East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust to focus on greater equity of access and better patient outcomes through a hybrid human and digital personalised cancer care partnership.

Find out more here.

Best Use of AI and Automation Tools

Congratulations to our winners PATCHS, with their next generation online consultation system powered by artificial intelligence triage and workflows, to help practices manage rising demand whilst improving patient access. 

PATCHs enables easy two-way communication between patients and their GP practice and has been implemented at scale, currently supporting more than 1,000 GP practices. Results show improvements in workload management, including 85 percent of all requests being dealt with fully online, along with a 20 percent reduction in self-care patients submitting requests and telephone calls reduced by 50 percent. On an access note, University of Manchester research had indicated that older patients find PATCHs easier to navigate than expected, and it was their preferred method for contacting their GP.

Well done also to Polygeist and Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, our runners up, with their work using AI to predict real-time patient risk and long stays.

Read more about the category here.

Best Solution to Support Elective Care Recovery

In this category, our winners are Surgery Hero and NHS Cheshire and Merseyside, who collaborated to identify high-risk individuals on the waiting list and provide targeted support.

Surgery Hero offers a health coaching app designed to support patients before and after surgery, with personalised guidance from health coaches, meal plans, exercise videos and goal-setting features. High-risk individuals from NHS Cheshire and Merseyside were referred for individualised prehabilitation to help them improve overall health and wellness before surgery, with 58 percent of patients previously deemed unfit for surgery declared fit as a result of participation in the programme. In addition, the programme saw a reduction of 2.6 days in length of hospital stay and a cost saving of £1,100 per patient.

C2-Ai were our runners up here, with their AI-backed prioritisation system for the elective waiting list.

Read on here.

Communication Tool of the Year

Congratulations to our winners Alcidion with Smartpage, an advanced smartphone and web-based system for hospital communication and task management.

Smartpage facilitates rapid, reliable and contextual messaging with two-way closed loop communication. Supporting staff to manage tasks and helping to provide comprehensive task handovers, Smartpage provides staff with full visibility of activity, helping them to prioritise and react quickly to deteriorating patients. With its introduction at Guy’s and Thomas’s NHS Foundation Trust, users have cited benefits such as improvements in patient care, easier clinical collaboration, real-time data insight and better integration. In addition, when Smartpage was implemented at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals, they reported an average of 60 percent of daily jobs activated within five minutes.

Well done also to runners up vCreate, with their secure video service connecting patients, families and healthcare professionals, allowing them to upload smartphone-recorded videos and photos for clinical review.

Learn more about the finalists here.

Best Use of Data

In this category, we congratulate our winners Cambridge and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust, who worked with Health.io to pilot a digital wound registry, providing caseload oversight for patients living with chronic wounds.

Using AI and machine learning, the solution – Minuteful for Wound – calculates consistent wound measurements, simplifies quality documentation with evidence-based clinical assessment flows, and provides a remote monitoring caseload review platform. It allows a comprehensive 3D wound scan to be taken using a smartphone or tablet with two calibration stickers, then documents the wound upon the patient’s admission with automatic measurements and tissue distribution, and then supports clinicians in tracking the status of the wound.

NHS Shared Business Services and Medway NHS Foundation Trust are our runners up, with their work to develop an analytics solution capable of predicting staff at risk of leaving so that the trust can implement strategies to reduce employee turnover and positively impact patient care.

Find out more here.

Health Tech Digital Pathway and Workflow Optimisation 

Congratulations to our winners, Maidstone and Turnbridge Wells NHS Trust and Altera Digital Health, who developed a virtual fracture clinic within Altera’s Sunrise EPR. 

The virtual fracture clinic (VFC) is designed to speed up access to orthopaedic care for patients attending A&E, and to provide an end-to-end digital pathway from admission through to inpatient, theatre and outpatient services. The solution was co-developed by the EPR team and the VFC clinical project team with input from service users and clinicians. The trust notes that introduction of the system has seen approximately 75 percent of all fracture referrals become digital, saving up to eight days of admin time per month, and has also helped the trust save £8,574 per annum in printing costs. In addition, using Sunrise EPR means that VFC staff can directly access inpatient records, thus increasing efficiency.

Solutions 4 Health Ltd took the runner up spot with Ask Teddi, an AI-powered mobile app developed in collaboration with Thurrock Council, designed to help parents and guardians by providing interactive, evidence-based support.

Find out more here.

Best Solution Supporting New Models of Care

Our winners in this category are Vygon UK Ltd, with their collaboration with University Hospital of Wales, which saw a system developed to allow heart failure patients at end-of-life to be cared for at home with a seven-day treatment.

Vygon took part in a 12-month pilot with the hospital using the Accufuser – a single-use silicone balloon infusion pump, designed to deliver a continuous flow of safe and accurate infusions for a variety of treatments including chemotherapy, pain management or antibiotics. The pilot saw the technology delivering the infusion over a seven-day period instead of 24 hours, collaborating with clinical teams to establish pump volumes, flow rates and constituents to get the system to work. Following success in Wales, the Accufuser has been deployed with more than 60 virtual ward patients at Medway NHS Foundation. Trust, saving a reported £160,000.

Our runners up are Solve.Care with Care.Labs, a development portal allowing clients to imagine their ideal digital network to provide healthcare services.

Read more here.

Digital Social Care or Mental Health Solution of the Year

Congratulations to our winners, PCMIS Health Technologies Ltd, with their evidence-based digital mental health tool designed to to track and evaluate patients’ treatment response during Talking Therapy. 

PCMIS captured data from over 5 million patients to develop ‘outcome feedback’ technology. Initially developed by analysing data from a large group of NHS patients to create charts capable of visualising patients’ typical changes in symptoms over the course of therapy, these charts went on to be translated into graphs and digital tools embedded within the PCMIS system. As a result, clinicians can be aided in their decision-making through a real-time, data-driven digital mental health tool capable of tracking and evaluating patient response to therapy. A clinical trial involving over 2,200 patients showed that the technology reduced the risk of deterioration in the most severe cases by up to 73 percent, and when used in routine practice, it has been shown to lead to a 25 percent reduction in the number of treatment sessions required to help a patient reach the same treatment outcome.

Congratulations also to our runners up, Intelligent Lilli, with their solution combining machine learning, behavioural analytics and sensor technology to support independent living with vulnerable people.

Find out more about the finalists here.

Partnership of the Year

In this category, we offer congratulations to Alvie Health and East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust (ESNEFT), for their human and digital hybrid model of scalable personalised care for NHS cancer patients. 

Alvie and ESNEFT co-created the hybrid service, which incorporates a AI-driven risk stratification algorithm and dashboard, identifying patient requirements for different levels of support. High-risk patients are signposted to hospital-based specialist professionals, whilst low to moderate risk groups receive technology-enabled guidance and support. A simple online referral portal allows easy referrals to the Alvie service, with a number of benefits reported including a reduction in measured distress and anxiety, a reduction in the median post-operative hospital stay for colorectal patients, and an increase in chemo patients’ weekly step count.

Well done also to our runners up, Sunderland GP Alliance and Iatro, with their work to improve digital access to primary care services by creating a digital front door.

Read more about the projects and programmes here.

Best Solution for Clinicians 

In our penultimate category, we congratulate Polygeist and Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, for their work incorporating AI to develop real-time patient risk and long stay prediction. 

With reduction of long stays a national priority for the NHS, Polygeist and Gloucester Hospitals NHS FT worked together on the second phase of a project using an AI algorithm to predict patients’ length of stay in hospital, personalised risk factor combinations, and likelihood of mortality. Each observation captured by nursing staff and prescribing clinicians is processed in real-time along with diagnostic test results, surfacing key insights to the right person at the right time. It supports clinicians in receivung up-to-date, real-time estimated date of discharge which is accurate to within 12 hours, via the trust’s EPR.

We also congratulate our runners up, Priory, who introduced the Mulesoft AnyPoint platform to connect and automate clinical date across multiple systems securely.

Find out more here.

Innovation of the Year 

And last but not least, we come to our final category of the Health Tech Awards 2023. Congratulations to the winners, Imprivata and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, for their work to overcome slow log-in times affecting user adoption and patient care, by implementing Imprivata’s OneSign. 

1,700 clinicians across the trust had Imprivata’s OneSign® Single Sign On rolled out to them, supporting them to tap their card reader on a workstation, kiosk or device to unlock it. The Epic Connect application is then loaded and logged in automatically, allowing clinicians to complete their work before simply tapping their card once again to lock the device. Patient information is held securely without clinicians needing to remember and spend time on complex log-in details. The trust reports that license utilisation is at 94.8 percent, meaning a high user adoption rate; during a seven-day period in which systems were monitored, there were 141,092 logins. Previously, this number of logins wold have taken 627,250 seconds, but with Imprivata’s solution, this time was reduced to just 125,450 seconds, creating a time saving of 139 hours per week.

Accurx takes the runner up spot with Self-Book, a solution allowing patients to book appointments using a specific link sent from their GP surgery, with the appointment automatically integrated into the underlying clinical system.

Read more about the finalists in this category here.

A huge congratulations to all our winners, our runners up, and to everyone who entered the awards! We hope you’ve enjoyed reading about the breadth of innovative thinking across the health tech industry; if you’d like to catch up on all the categories and the finalists, you can do so here.