Innovate UK awards Healum £536,103 to build AI clinicians can trust

London, 4 June 2019. Healum, a London-based health technology company, has been awarded a £536,103 grant from Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, to tackle the lack of trust in AI amongst clinicians. With the grant in place, Healum is opening its Series A investment round.

What the grant will fund

The award comes through Innovate UK’s Digital Health Technology Catalyst funding competition. It will accelerate Healum’s work on a new approach to AI: one that crowdsources second opinions from networks of clinicians to suggest the best possible interventions for patients with long-term conditions.

The approach is designed to give clinicians more confidence in assistive AI technology, and to increase their capacity to monitor, motivate and support patients when they are outside the clinical environment.

Testing it with an NHS diabetes service

Healum will be joined by Vernova CIC, an Eastern Cheshire provider of NHS services, which will receive £79,772 of the grant to research how effective Healum’s digital solutions are for people with type 2 diabetes in its patient population.

As part of the R&D project, Healum will deploy and test its AI-based digital solutions with Vernova, which will use what it learns to improve patient access to, and engagement with, its Community Diabetes service.

In their words

“The adoption of AI technology has a significant potential to increase the capacity of healthcare professionals to treat more patients at a lower cost. At the moment AI is underutilised owing to a lack of trust and understanding amongst clinicians. Our approach to AI is akin to training algorithms using peer-reviewed input, enabling healthcare professionals involved in providing care for people with Type 2 Diabetes to have a greater trust in the use of AI assisted recommendations. This Innovate UK funded project and the additional investment that flows from it will significantly help us to realise that vision for any long term condition that requires patient self-management and inputs from multidisciplinary teams of healthcare professionals.”

Jonathan Abraham, CEO and Co-founder, Healum

“We are pleased to be partnering with Healum and Innovate UK on this project. Thousands of people across East Cheshire are living with Type 2 Diabetes and this app and software has the potential to enable our teams to deliver personalised care and support as part of our Diabetes Community Service.”

Pete Wilson, Clinical Head of Research, Vernova

About Healum

Healum is a digital health company with a mission to improve the health of 100 million people by creating digital solutions that enable health professionals to support people with long-term conditions.

About Innovate UK

Innovate UK drives productivity and economic growth by supporting businesses to develop and realise the potential of new ideas. It connects businesses to the partners, customers and investors that can help them turn ideas into commercially successful products, services and business growth, and funds businesses and research collaborations to accelerate innovation. Innovate UK is part of UK Research and Innovation.

What happened next

Healum and Vernova went on to test Healum’s care planning software and app in a randomised controlled trial across 15 GP practices in Eastern Cheshire, funded by UKRI. Read the trial results, and Healum 2.0, from 2021, on the chapter that followed.