A medicine tech start-up has been awarded £1m in grant funding from Innovate UK to transform how medicines are taken.
With the funding CONNECT Care intends to bring new software to market that it says can ‘digitise the brain of a pharmacist’.
The technology takes data that is currently siloed in medical records and transforms it into contextualised, personalised information, which can be provided to patients, carers and clinicians so they can make crucial links between medicines and their impact on an individual’s wider health.
The secure online platform will use a patient’s NHS number to make the information available – a national first.
An earlier version of the technology won the #CareHackathon at Digital Health Rewired. The newer version of the tech builds on CONNECT Care’s work to digitise medicine and create the first comprehensive, single source of truth on medicines data for healthcare professionals and patients.
Issa Dasu-Patel, CEO of CONNECT Care, said: “Prescribed medicines are the most common intervention in healthcare; there are billions of medicines being taken by millions of people every year. But medicines have been excluded from the digital health revolution.
“We are joining the dots and unlocking the vast benefits that better insights on medicines can bring to patients and health professionals. Using just an NHS number, we can create personalised, contextualised insights that will help people stay well.
“We’re so grateful to receive this additional Innovate UK backing so we can scale this application of our software and move a step closer towards creating a single source of truth for medicines data in the UK.”
The funding from Innovate UK was awarded in two phases. In late 2022 CONNECT Care received an investment of £615,000, followed by a further £495,000 more recently.
The company’s technology will help to deliver medicine insights that can help reduce additional health complications. For example, it can help determine if a new prescription may increase a patient’s likelihood of falling, or if a certain combination of drugs can lead to dehydration.
The funding CONNECT Care has received from Innovate UK will play its part in helping to digitise the health sector, which was the main target of the digital health and social care plan released last year.
The plan revealed that £2 billion has been allocated to help bring the health system into the 21st century.