Huma, a global company offering AI and digital healthcare solutions, has announced its acquisition of eConsult, a digital-first triage and automated consultation platform. The announcement follows the launch of Huma’s Cloud Platform and Workspace solutions, as well as the company’s recent “strategic acquisition” of iPlato, a tool for appointment booking, medicines management, and communications tools.
Welcoming the news were Dan Vahdat, Huma CEO and founder, who spoke of his hopes this latest acquisition will bring Huma “one step closer to becoming the end-to-end technology platform for the industry to deliver digital-first care at scale seamlessly”; and Dr Murray Ellender, CEO at eConsult, who said that joining forces with Huma is ” an amazing opportunity for both our users and our teams to accelerate the shift to digital first healthcare”.
eConsult is reportedly already in use in more than 1,800 GP practices and a “growing number of NHS acute trusts”, helping to support remote consultations and patients getting to “the right clinician first time, every time” by collecting triage details on kiosks installed in ED waiting rooms and “ensuring all patients arriving…are booked in and triaged within 5 minutes of arrival”.
The launch of the Huma Workspace is intended to help connect primary, community, and secondary care providers, along with ICBs, to a “comprehensive array of digital health solutions” such as appointment booking, automated prescriptions, screening tools, remote monitoring, virtual wards, and more.
The addition of eConsult is said tol allow the integration of triage and automated consultation features to help “streamline care, improve outcomes, and significantly increase efficiency across clinical settings”. The platform integrates with EMR providers including SystemOne, EMIS and Epic, and has also been “embedded” into the NHS app, creating “a seamless digital front door for patients and healthcare providers”.
Digital innovation and tools from across the NHS
At the end of September, health secretary Wes Streeting called for a tech- and data-driven reform of the NHS, citing “grim” results from the Darzi report and “a decade of underinvestment”, pledging to tackle long waiting lists and create “a digital healthcare service powered by cutting-edge technology”. Streeting highlighted the need for a shift toward preventative care – “from analogue to digital, from hospital to community, from sickness to prevention. Reform is not just possible, it is happening.”
The same week, HTN ran a poll over on LinkedIn, asking our readers where they thought digital investment should go in the short term, with options including patient-facing tech, cross-organisational workflows, data/analytics/visibility tools, and digitising/removing paper.
NHS England published a series of improvement guides and analytic tools designed to help support flow through the emergency care pathway; to generate greater value for patients from theatres, elective surgery, perioperative care and outpatient services; and to improve medical consultant job planning. The tools are “improvement analytic compartments in the Model Health System”, which aim to help staff use data to identify opportunities, examine comparisons with other areas, and track progress over time.
We also took a deep dive into the latest news, views, and research on the current and future value of EPR solutions, looking at updates from across the NHS, predictions for the EPR market in the coming three to five years, insights from health tech experts on future EPRs, and the impact of “nudges” on care quality and outcomes.
