Each week we spotlight one of our DigitalHealth.London businesses, founders or NHS fellows. Today we’re excited to introduce Hippo Labs, our current DigitalHealth.London accelerator company.
What challenge are you facing and why is it important?
Preventative care, such as vaccinations, screenings and long-term disease management, is vital for people who have or are at risk of long-term illnesses. However, existing systems remain, making effective preventative care difficult at the organizational level. Performing administrative tasks (e.g., patient bookings) associated with this care equates to thousands of hours per year, which could be better spent working directly with patients. Every pound spent on prevention returns £14 in employee benefits – the Hippo Recaller simplifies proactive and preventative care to keep people healthy and reduce practice workload.
What is the solution you have developed and how can it help solve the problem?
Hippopotamus laboratories has developed a platform that automates the work of planning/organizing preventive care and optimizes the use of clinical teams. The platform connects to the patient’s care record, analyzes the entire record to understand the care needs of the individual and the entire population, then consolidates those needs to minimize appointments and automates the process reservation. For suppliers, everything is automatically populated and it only takes a single click to launch reminder campaigns. Our intelligent messaging solutions learn and adapt to drive adoption and minimize costs. Our clear, actionable analytics practices help you see how they’re doing and what areas need more work. This all-in-one platform removes all administrative burden from preventative care, improving patient and practice outcomes.
What is the history of your company?
The Hippo Recaller platform was designed by Sachin Gupta, while he was working as a practice manager for a group of practices in South East London. The large number of proactive care goals (such as QOF and IIF programs) and lack of systems modernization meant that this important area of medicine was difficult to achieve and required enormous manual effort. After spending several years testing the platform locally, we found that our initial thesis of workload automation helps improve adoption of long-term care management services and streamline workload for everyone . We are now starting to expand outside of South East London to work with practices across the country.
What successes have you had so far through successful pilots/trials/contracts?
The Hippo Recaller platform has been used by several practices, PCNs, federations and third sector providers (e.g. Prostate Cancer UK). When fully implemented, practices now use Hippo as their primary reminder method for patients in several different target areas. In a case study with a South East London PCN, we found that practices using Hippo were able to improve their uptake of diabetes services by 2.5 times compared to practices not using Hippo. platform. We worked with Prostate Cancer UK to customize the platform to meet their aims of widening the screening network for men at risk of prostate cancer, without increasing the workload on practices.
What are your future goals? What does success look like?
Hippo Labs is now open to working with a wider range of PCNs and practices – we want to bring intelligent automation to as many patients and providers as possible! We also have some amazing features up our sleeves – check out our blog to keep up to date with the latest releases!
How has your time at the DigitalHealth.London Accelerator helped you achieve these goals?
The DigitalHealth.London accelerator has helped Hippo understand how to work effectively with the NHS and enabled us to build excellent partnerships with providers and commissioners. We also met the team at Hero Health through the program – Hippo now integrates with Hero, enabling great features like “self-booking links” that benefit our practices and their patients.
Do you have any advice for future digital health companies?
The NHS is complex and has lots of different people doing different things: really think about the applications of your product and how different users might approach it. You may have to do research with people you don’t have easy access to, but once you start learning this way, you’ll never want to stop!
Any requests for the public?
Interested in an automated patient recall? Contact us!
Hippo Labs is currently part of Cohort 7 of the DigitalHealth.London Accelerator program.
THE DigitalHealth.London Accelerator The program 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 Leveling Up Fund.
For more information, please visit https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-
Shared Prosperity Fund prospectus.
