UK-based digital health startup, Forward Health raises funding of $3.9 Million
A UK-based healthcare startup, Forward Health, has helped NHS care systems securely send patient information using their app.
For years, the healthcare industry has relied on mediums like fax, outdated pages, WhatsApp and other communication modes to achieve security. These mediums, however, are not the safest modes of communication and pose real risks. Forward Health, a UK company, has come up with a messaging application that has transformed the way healthcare practitioners communicate. This app lets the clinicians and medical teams instantly communicate patient profiles in a safe, secure, confidential and compliant way.
Using this healthcare app, it is possible to send any kind of information ranging from simple smart-phone messages to photos. This way they have successfully received a seed funding of $3.9 million.
Forward Health was found in 2016 by a serial entrepreneur Philip Mundy and two doctors, Barney Gilbert and Lydia Yarlott from the UK. The company had a preseed funding of $1.3 million, summing the total to $5.2 million. This company offers this facility to some 5,000 British healthcare practitioners and doctors. The bigger picture is to connect healthcare systems around the world by improving the between doctor-to-doctor or doctor-to-patient communication.
Stride VC, the new VC fund from Fred Destin, led the round with additional support from Albion Capital and other investors. They include renowned individuals like Melissa Morris and Jay Desai too. The company plans to use this funding to widen the audience and get more British doctors to use this platform.
The Forward Health app is free to download and allows doctors and others working in the healthcare industry to create, share and update the patient profiles. An additional feature of this application is that it enables connections across NHS hospitals with the help of a search function and further filters depending on their specialization, staff role, on-call status, and more.
Another company Siilo from the Netherlands proposed a similar idea a few days before the U.K start-up and raised € 4.5 million. HIPAA compliant text message technologies offered by technology vendors like pMDsoft, DocsInk and Doc Halo have been playing an important role in communications related to the US’ ongoing opioid epidemic.
A few other startups like Klara and many others are finding platforms that allow better communications between doctors and patients, and other medical information between care teams.
The co-founder of Forward Health, Philip Mundy expressed that the fragmentation observed in the communications in healthcare has a direct impact on how appropriately the clinicians carry out their respective jobs and the level of care patients receive. According to him, the inefficient methods used by doctors and nurses working in the NHS has led to the waste of time and delays in information flow.
He further says that any app created for healthcare related communication should be NHS digital compliant, GDPR compliant and should operate with extreme data security. He feels that apps like WhatsApp and others, mostly used by clinicians to communicate, do not provide enough security. He says that this was why the Forward Health app was created, by and for the doctors, and for the safe communication of patient information.
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