Healthtech-1 has announced that it has raised £2.7 million in seed funding with plans to expand their automation solutions for primary care, aiming to reduce the admin burden and to help “fix” primary care with tech.
The platform currently automates new patient registrations and lab report filings, which Healthtech-1 refers to as “two of the most error-prone manual tasks”, with the solution live in 704 practices. The ambition is for the solution to be live in up to 90 percent of the market by the end of next year.
The team is also developing its second product, Automated Lab Reports, which is reportedly capable of automating “about 20 percent” of normal and abnormal results that practices receive at present. The Healthtech-1 team predicts that if the lab product expanded to 46 percent of England’s GP practices, and automate 50 percent of practice results, it could add “equivalent of 2 million appointments a year”.
Now supported by the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Program, Healthtech-1 co-founder Pete Huang, says that the company will be focusing on “building core parts of the patient’s healthcare journey”, starting from “the very first touch point with a GP practice”, before AI capabilities can be turned on with “the flick of a switch”.
In a LinkedIn post, fellow co-founder Raj Kohli shared that working inside a GP practice every day had led to the realisation that “NHS staff are in desperate need of tech that works”.
Digital in primary care
In recent developments in digital primary care, recent statistics released by NHS England have shown that 1,301,924 GP appointments in April 2024 were classed as video/online, a trend that has increased each month from 172,114 reported video/online consultations in April 2023.
Earlier in the year, we hosted the Healthtech-1 team for a webinar discussion on all things automation, including realised benefits and use cases in practice.
HealthTech-1 also contributed to our recent feature exploring industry views on the current landscape of health tech in the UK, highlighting how “practices need easier ways to choose the technology they want to use”.
Dr Amanda Doyle, NHS England national director for primary care and community services, also recently wrote to GPs and practice managers to clarify information around enhancements to the GP Connect Update Record. The letter made reference to the enhancement of GP Connect functionality to enable information from secondary and community care, such as pharmacy first and blood pressure or contraception services, to surface directly into GP practice clinical systems and practice workflows, rather than being sent to practices via NHS Mail.
