As the seventh cohort of the DigitalHealth.London accelerator program draws to a close, we celebrate the remarkable achievements of our participating companies. Today, we’re celebrating Hippo Labs and its Hippo Recaller digital platform, which automates the administrative work of preventive care planning and optimizes the utilization of clinical teams.
What is the challenge you are facing?
Preventative care, such as vaccinations, screenings and chronic disease management, is essential for people with or at risk of chronic conditions. However, GP practices today use outdated systems that make it difficult to implement effective preventative care at an organisational level. The extensive administrative tasks associated with this care take up thousands of hours of practice time each year, time that could be better spent working directly with patients. Inefficient appointment booking processes also waste resources, as patients are often matched with the wrong clinician for their needs or attend more appointments than necessary. Every £1 spent on prevention returns £14 in benefits – the Hippo Recaller simplifies proactive and preventative care to keep people healthy and reduce practice workloads.
What is the solution you have developed and how can it help solve the problem?
Hippo Laboratories has developed a platform that automates the administrative work of scheduling preventive care and optimizes the utilization of clinical teams. The platform connects to the patient’s medical record, analyzes the entire record to understand the care needs of an individual and the entire population, and then consolidates these needs to minimize appointments and automate the booking process. For providers, everything is automatically populated and reminder campaigns are just a click away. Our intelligent messaging solutions learn and adapt to drive adoption and minimize costs. With our clear, actionable analytics, practices can see how they are doing and what areas need more work. This all-in-one platform removes all the administrative burden from preventive care, improving patient and practice outcomes.
What have you achieved through the DigitalHealth.London Accelerator?
Since the launch of the DigitalHealth.London Accelerator, Hippo Recaller has been used at a variety of levels including GP practices, Primary Care Networks (PCNs), federations and the third sector. As the platform has a wide range of applications, it is suitable for use with many different providers and partners including:
Penrose Health Large Scale Practice Group
- Hippo Recaller is their only automated reminder tool for all Quality and Outcomes (QOF)/Target/Proactive Care work. This means that the reminder for all long-term health status reviews has been automated, significantly reducing the number of hours spent managing these reviews (from 8-10 Full Time Equivalents (FTEs) to 2 FTEs) and increasing adoption of reviews and outcomes for practices (QOF results are improved by 10-20% compared to last year).
- Additionally, the platform was used for urgent outreach programs such as seasonal flu and COVID vaccination, enabling practices to reach previous vaccination levels a month earlier than last year, with higher overall adoption.
North Lewisham Primary Care Network
- Hippo Recaller was used to improve the percentage of diabetes patients receiving the eight care processes across the nine practices in the network. The PCN decided to focus the use of the platform on the six worst performing practices to ‘close the gap’ as part of a local incentive scheme. Where Hippo was used, service utilisation was 2.5 times higher than in non-targeted practices, ending the recall process with results far in excess of those initially anticipated.
- We continued to work with them after the end of the year and made over 2,000 contacts, filling every available PCN diabetes review slot without any manual effort from the practices or the PCN.
One Health Lewisham Federation (OHL)
- Hippo Recaller was used to identify homebound patients requiring a home visit from a mobile healthcare professional. By directly integrating with practice systems and automatically displaying patient lists in real-time, we reduced the OHL team’s administrative time by more than half.
- Thanks to the platform’s mapping function, OHL was able to locate patients and, by booking wisely, reduce the healthcare professional’s travel distance. This allowed more examinations to be carried out in a single day, improving the efficiency of the service offered.
Prostate cancer in the UK
- Hippo Recaller was used to identify and inform people at greatest risk of developing this cancer, prompting them to undergo cancer screening as soon as possible. This is necessary as there is currently no national screening programme for such a common cancer.
- Although we are still at the beginning of our implementation, the first figures seem positive and the impact on practices is almost zero, which makes it a simple but effective tool to deploy more widely.
Where have you had the best adoption/spread/impact?
Providers who tested the product saw the highest adoption and impact for Hippo Recaller. Those who took advantage of the pilots offered to them saw a significant positive impact on their teams’ workload and overall results.
(Hippo Recaller is) faster than spreadsheets, much more efficient and I can see other long term diseases. It has been great for our diabetes campaign. Working with Hippo has made a huge difference.
Head of care coordination in a PCN
Practices have used the platform to recall all QOF indicators, their seasonal flu and spring COVID campaigns, and even to book patients into hub-level services and redirect appointments to more available locations. They have seen improved achievement of QOF targets, including higher and more appropriate utilisation of clinical services. It has also freed up hundreds of hours for administrative staff, who no longer need to focus as much on the timely call/recall process. The dashboard has been particularly effective as patient lists are now live on the platform rather than having to be extracted, uploaded and processed in a presentation.
For the Hippo Labs team, working with these practices has helped us determine how the platform is growing and better understand what features are useful and how they can be improved. This development has ranged from targeted, tailored integrations to building meaningful dashboards and metrics to forming a “manual recall team” where Hippo Labs calls “non-responsive” patients who don’t respond to automated messages. This feature has helped us refine and grow Hippo Recaller, significantly increasing platform usage and providing us with much more feedback to act on.
The firms involved have decided to continue implementing the platform after the pilot phase and to formulate new requests for individual targets with which they previously had difficulties. For all parties involved, there is no going back, as a large part of the process has been streamlined thanks to the Hippo Recaller platform.
Hippo (Recaller) saves more than half the time, or more than three months of work for two care coordinators.
Senior Care Coordinator in a PCN
How did you make the most of your time on the DigitalHealth.London Accelerator?
Meeting people through the Accelerator has allowed us to build relationships and even partnerships with neighboring companies. This has improved our product and allowed us to move at a faster pace, offering a better service and a better platform overall.
The monthly catch-up meetings have been informative and helpful in guiding us on what can be achieved, how we might adjust our strategy and how to work around obstacles. (A special thank you to our NHS Navigator, Lavinia!)
Finally, being part of the Accelerator has significantly boosted the legitimacy of Hippo Labs and the Hippo Recaller platform, which is important in such a crowded market. DigitalHealth.London’s recognized brand has given credibility to the product among people who may have previously been skeptical.
The DigitalHealth.London Accelerator has done exactly what we hoped for. We are now more developed than we thought and have used the Accelerator platform to build strong relationships and even a product partnership! It’s just great to have an experienced eye to look at things, and we wouldn’t have gotten to where we are without the Accelerator.
Dr. Jonathan Sadler
Clinical Manager at Hippo Labs
THE DigitalHealth.London Accelerator The programme is funded by the UK Government through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF). It is delivered by the Health Innovation Network (HIN) South London in partnership with the Office of Life Sciences, CW+, Medicity, NHS England, the Mayor of London and the Levelling Up Fund.
For more information, please visit https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-
Shared Prosperity Fund prospectus.
