Welcome to the big reveal of the Health Tech Awards 2024, sponsored by CCube Solutions – at long last, we are delighted to share our winners with you!

Firstly, thanks where thanks is due: we’ve had a wonderful cohort of judges helping to review each entry, made up of experienced and insightful health tech professionals from across the industry. We’re so grateful that they have given their time and energy to help us judge the entries.

Thank you to everyone who has helped us announce our winners, and of course to everyone who has entered the awards – alongside our judges, we’ve had a great time reading about all your hard work and innovative efforts to help make a difference to patients and staff. Each entry brings something worthwhile to the healthcare system, and we’re pleased to be able to shine a spotlight on each one in our finalists showcase.

So, onto the winners: we have 14 this year, with a winner for each category and an overall winner for the awards. Without further ado, let’s see who they are!

Announcing our winner in the category of ‘best health tech solution of the year’, we have Dr Osman Bhatti, GP and CCIO for North East London. 

Out of a busy category of 16 entries, we want to offer congratulations  to our winners, NHS England, JDRF UK and Diabetes UK!

This project focuses on Hybrid Closed Loop (HCL), an algorithm designed to administer insulin by connecting continuous glucose monitor readings with an insulin pump to stabilise blood glucose levels, reduce long-term complications and ultimately save lives. The design and delivery of HCL has been a six-decade programme of systematic medical research supported by JDRF UK and Diabetes UK, with NHS England working to ensure funding was available to run a pilot across 35 centres. Data collected from 900 individuals showed improvement in overall diabetes control and quality of life, and HCL is set to become the first line of treatment for type 1 diabetes for people of all ages.

Congratulations also to our highly commended entry, MARCH Labs, whose project targeted the need for early detection and management of  Cauda Equina Syndrome and led to the development of a machine learning model that can detect high risks on MRI scans.

Up next, Lynne Mellor, non-executive director on the board of York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

A huge congratulations to the winners, The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and Digital Health and Care Wales!

Their clinically-led system for paediatric growth charts spans Wales and enables clinicians in any setting to share growth measurements through a national system. The project saw clinician coders at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health develop an API that can be plugged into electronic health records. Working together, the RCPCH developed an innovative open-source growth measures capability and DHCW are delivering the clinically led integrated care system alongside the national architecture to make it available across care settings. It offers a single, national, validated system for accurate growth recording, simplifying the process of tracking, reviewing and contributing to growth data

Congratulations also to highly commended entry C8 Health, with their platform designed to simplify clinical knowledge management by unifying, managing, and integrating clinical resources into care team’s daily workflows.

Adam Lavington, director of digital transformation for Hertfordshire and West Essex ICB, joined us to announce the results of the ‘best use of data’ category.

Congratulations to winners Nottingham University Hospitals and Nervecentre!

Working in collaboration, Nottingham University Hospitals and Nervecentre are accelerating the safe transfer of patients through the hospitals using a ‘Reverse Bed Chain’ model, enabled by system-wide data visibility via Nervecentre’s electronic patient record. Nervecentre developed AI functionality as an integrated part of the EPR, designed to discover and propose bed moves in real-time. As the entire team is connected to Nervecentre, everyone including porters and cleaners is instantly alerted to tasks via their mobile device to support efficiency. In the first three months the trust completed 899 reverse bed chains, and the time taken to carry out a three-part sequence of transfers reduced from around four hours to one hour, releasing an estimated three hours of ED staff time to focus on care.

For our highly commended entry, we offer congratulations to Think Healthcare with their localised and focused approach to data helped a surgery provide a blueprint that could be replicated nationwide.

To help us announce the winning and highly commended entries for ‘best use of digital for primary care’, we were joined by Dr Shanker Vijay, GP lead for digital transformation in primary care across London.

Congratulations to our winners, Holly Health!

Their Intelligent Habit Coach combines accessible, person-centred health and habit coaching (via web and mobile app), to improve population health and prevention while unlocking data insights for local and regional teams. Holly Health takes into account user conditions, goals and habits, with coaching tailored for all major long-term conditions. It is available to over 1.8 million individuals via NHS primary care, with the platform currently available in over 200 GP practices in the UK. Average user outcomes include a +15 percent average increase in cardio exercise; a + 13 percent average improvement to self-management; and 33 percent users reporting less need for GP support.

Congratulations also to the highly commended Redmoor Health, who developed and implemented a digital toolkit to support general practices in redesigning their appointment systems.

Stephen Bromhall, chief officer for digital and data at South East Coast Ambulance Service NHS Trust, joined us to share the details of the ‘best use of digital for NHS trusts’ category.

For this category, we are congratulating Access Health Support and Care, working alongside Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust!

Mersey Care worked with Access HSC to integrate its Rio EPR system with a social prescribing tool, Elemental, allowing mental health professionals to refer patients to Mersey Care’s Life Rooms service directly through familiar Rio software. The interoperability of systems enables service users to be supported in a safe, well-governed way by a team at Life Rooms with specialist knowledge, whilst clinical teams would also have full oversight of case notes and the support that referred patients had utilised. To date over 1,396 individuals have been referred and over 2,000 social prescriptions co-produced.

And a big congratulations to our highly commended entry Alertive, with their secure emergency communication platform designed to meet the critical needs of NHS trusts by enabling real-time collaboration among healthcare professionals.

 

For ‘best use of digital for integrated care systems’, Northern Care Alliance Foundation Trust’s chief digital and information officer Lorna Allan helped us announce our winners.

Congratulations to Health Innovation Manchester and NHS Greater Manchester!

This project saw people in Greater Manchester receive more personalised care through a new digital care plan and a patient-facing app ‘My GM Care’, further enhancing the GM Care Record and better informing care and treatment. The new care plan was developed and launched to support people with dementia and heart failure to help tailor care, and the GM Care app was launched to enable patients to view their own information and contribute to their care. More information has also been brought into the GMCR through multiple sources, with key outcomes showing over 21,000 healthcare professionals utilising it over 270,000 times each month: a 21 percent increase in users from 2022/23.

And for our highly commended entry, we offer congratulations to e18 Innovation, a female-led SME focused on helping the NHS become more self-sufficient through utilising automation and adopting new working methodologies.

Sharon Osterfield, transformation director at e18 Innovation, joined us to announce the results of the ‘innovation of the year’ category’.

Congratulations to our winners at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust!

At Guy’s and St Thomas’, robotic process automation (RPA) was put into place with an underpinning clinical governance framework to improve patient pathways, waiting list administration and missed appointments. RPA was used to eliminate 54,000 errors ahead of a new EHR launch, equivalent to 1,300 hours of staff time in nine months. Automation was also utilised to help reduce missed appointments, with the trust identifying that 25 percent of SMS reminders sent to patients would fail as the phone number was not accurate. Automation was implemented to ensure mobile numbers are kept up-to-date, and in the first six weeks of launch, 71 percent of patients registered to the service had their number updated with early findings showing a decreased did-not-attend rate.

And to our highly commended entry, congratulations to Patchs with the Telephone Assistant, a solution utilising speech recognition technology to help tackle the 8am rush for general practice and also help tackle digital exclusion.

 

We welcomed Sally Mole, digital programme manager from The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust, to help us announce the next category.

Congratulations to winners North West London Pathology!

In 2023, North West London Pathology completed a six-year-long network transformation project, replacing multiple legacy lab management systems with a single solution. The project sought to reduce touchpoints from multiple independent systems to a single harmonised system, enabling a one-size-fits-all training solution and staff interoperability between sites as well as providing access to test results for primary to tertiary care providers. Over 100 staff consultations were held, and implementation was achieved in parallel to providing ongoing pathology services. Integration with local and national systems allows remote access and point-of-care testing support; abnormal results are flagged across the system; and patients now benefit from a holistic view of their pathology history at every level of care.

And congratulations to the highly commended entry Altera Digital and Bolton NHS Foundation Trust: the implementation of Altera’s Sunrise EPR at Bolton has elevated digital maturity, enhancing patient care and supporting operational excellence.

David Gunion, digital programme manager at Southern GP Alliance, helped us announce the ‘most promising pilot’ category. 

Congratulations to East and North Hertfordshire Trust and Hertfordshire Community Trust in partnership with Doccla UK Limited on your win!

Doccla partnered with East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust over a six-month pilot programme earlier this year to test an innovative care model for supporting heart failure patients to manage their condition at home through remote monitoring, guided self-management, and patient education. The pilot saw 30-day readmissions related to heart failure reduced from three to zero, saving £6,822 across 52 patients in three months. For the trust’s 4,176 registered heart failure patients, this is estimated to result in savings of ~£558,601 over 6 months. Results also showed reductions in total A&E contacts, non-elective inpatient contacts, and heart failure A&E contacts, and measurable improvements were seen in mobility, self-care, quality of life and improvement in anxiety and depression.

And for this category, the highly commended entry is Alternative Futures Group – congratulations! Their team led an innovative virtual reality project with patients to relieve distress caused by their symptoms.

For this category we were joined by Dr Dan Bunstone, GP in Warrington and clinical director for Warrington Innovation Network.

Here, we’re congratulating Holmusk UK!

Their Management and Supervision Tool (MaST) is helping trusts use data to work smarter, using predictive analytics to help clinical teams improve the decisions they make about resource allocation and patient flow. It offers an intelligent analytics platform that analyses multiple data sources that go into a trust’s data warehouse to predict people’s likelihood of requiring crisis care, enabling clinicians to effectively manage their caseloads. It is currently implemented in 12 mental health trusts in England and has demonstrated a substantial return on investment for a mental health trust, with a report on a large trust identifying positive findings such as an estimated efficiency saving of £1.7 million in the six-month period after MaST, and a reduction in the duration of mental health crises and length of stay in an inpatient setting following a mental health crisis.

We’re also congratulations our highly commended entry, Hackathon Raptors! Founded by NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Meta engineers, Hackathon Raptors aims to revolutionise education and research via hackathons and since 2022, has hosted over five events, developed 100+ projects, and engaged 1000+ participants globally.

This category saw us joined by Dave Mills, head of Think Healthcare at Focus Group.

Congratulations to our winners, Health Innovation Manchester!

Health Innovation Manchester, alongside the Bury Integrated Delivery Collaborative, primary care, care homes, the local authority and SafeSteps, launched an initiative aimed to improve deterioration intervention and falls prevention for Bury care home residents. This involved the the deployment of a digital deterioration tracker (RESTORE2 and RESTORE2 Mini) and multifactorial falls prevention tool within one Safesteps app in 70 percent of care homes in the locality. As a result, 37 care homes in Greater Manchester reduce ambulance call outs by 20 percent in 12 months, with other results including saving approximately £5,175 in ambulance conveyance and £105,800 in inpatient stays in a three month period alone.

Congratulations also to our highly commended entry, Alternative Futures Group, with the ‘Tech Lending Library’ designed to give people the opportunity to trial technological items to understand if they can support independence.

Matt Lawrence, chief digital officer at inicio health, joined us for the next category.

A big congratulations to our winners, North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust!

The trust recognised the burden on the nursing workforce that comes about as a result of the need to manage acute and chronic wounds and implemented Minuteful for Wound (MfW), a digital wound management solution enables standardised assessment, measurement and documentation of wounds and monitoring over time. Clinicians complete a bespoke wound assessment using their smartphone and the AI-driven algorithms calculate automated wound measurements and identify the wound bed tissue types and give percentages of the distribution. With this reliable data, clinical teams can quickly identify deteriorating wounds and optimise care plans.

And we’re congratulating our highly commended entry Totalmobile with their solution Carelink, designed to optimise service capacity, care plans and scheduling in community care.

For our final category, we welcomed Lianne Jermome, digital and transformation lead at Yorkshire Health Partners.

Congratulations to University Hospitals Sussex, Netcall and e18 Innovation!

This collaboration saw the trust implement Netcall’s waiting list validation solution, automating the process of contacting patients waiting for their first appointment. Reminders are sent via SMS, email and letters with QR codes, with intelligent automation deployed via e18 Innovation to manage responses and ensure that data is processed back into the trust’s patient administration system. The approach has resulted in over an 80 percent response rate and the removal of over 13 percent of patients who no longer wish to be on the waiting lists, saving over 266 hours per week in manual data entry.

And the highly commended place goes to South Tees Waiting Well and Surgery Hero – congratulations! The Waiting Well programme offers face-to-face and remote support through a health coaching programme with personalised goal-setting and multimodal lifestyle support via a mobile phone application.

For the overall winner of the Health Tech Awards 2024, we are delighted to offer our congratulations to Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust!

The trust has worked in co-production with patients to create an interactive patient platform to support delivery of personalised care and support, namely holistic needs assessment. 

That draws the Health Tech Awards 2024 to a close – once again, the HTN team would like to offer a huge congratulations to our winners, our highly commended entries, and every single one of our finalists, as well as all the people who have helped us with this year’s awards.

If you’d like to read more about each category, you can do so here, and we hope you’ve enjoyed finding out more about the breadth of innovation happening across the industry!