Propel Healthtech West Yorkshire has announced the second cohort of innovators to its health tech accelerator programme, with a reported “even split” between its start-up and scale-up pathways. Selected innovators will be granted access to support and expert guidance designed to accelerate progress to real-world adoption.
Participants under the start-up element of the programme include Harmonai, an AI companion and personal therapist; Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust; Hellohope, a start-up focusing on mental health and suicide prevention training; Soma Health, a platform offering AI-powered health insights and personal health monitoring; and RadAssist AI, a platform using AI to surface follow-up recommendations for radiologists, offer AI-assisted triage, and more.
The scale-up programme welcomes innovators to its second cohort including the Doc Abode workforce scheduling platform for optimising urgent care referral staff deployment; LIVVE, an online pharmacy offering menopause symptom assessment and treatment; Northpoint Medical, supporting digital mental health therapies for adults, children, and young people; and Docomed, a platform using AI-powered analysis and intelligent cardiovascular monitoring to give clinicians advice and diagnostic support.
Christine Outram, chair of Health Innovation Yorkshire & Humber, talked about the Propel programmes impact, stating: “Propel alumni are gaining recognition regionally, nationally and internationally, with some recently showcasing their innovations at Westminster, and others securing awards and funding through the West Yorkshire Combined Authority Open Innovation Challenge. This is clear evidence that Propel can be a real springboard for health innovators. Today is about celebrating that progress, welcoming our second cohort of the Propel start up and scale up programme, and recognising the partnerships that make all this possible.”
Wider trend: Health tech innovation
The National Institute for Health and Care Research has awarded funding of £1.5 million to Leeds Teaching Hospitals as part of national funding to increase the NHS’s ability to deliver high-quality commercial research, to be used toward four initiatives including the development and validation of AI imaging algorithms to improve diagnostic accuracy.
NIHR’s Invention for Innovation Funding At the Speed of Translation programme is offering funding between £50,000 and £100,000 over a period of six-to-twelve months for preventative technologies in the community care space. The programme is designed to support the real-world integration of tech aligned with the prevention agenda into community care settings such as neighbourhood health hubs, community diagnostic centres, and community pharmacies.
The US Department of Health and Human Services has launched a $4million national competition to support innovation in living kidney donation, making a simultaneous commitment to promoting data standardisation and health information technology improvements in kidney care. The KidneyX Empower Challenge is seeking solutions offering improvements in public awareness, the identification and support of potential living donors, donor readiness and eligibility, donor-centred outcomes, and the sharing of knowledge on things like tackling administrative barriers and delays. Winners of the challenge will receive monetary prizes along with national recognition, according to HHS, which it hopes will help to accelerate the adoption of solutions on a wider scale.
