Our Innovation Fellowships

CardMedic is a digital point-of-care communication tool designed to help clinicians and allied healthcare professionals communicate with patients when barriers arise, such as foreign language, deafness, blindness, cognitive impairment, learning disabilities and illiteracy.

CardMedic is available as an app on mobile phones and tablets, and a webapp on laptops and desktops. CardMedic offers instant access to pre-scripted, pre-translated and flexible communication support for patients with differing abilities, capacities, languages and educational backgrounds. CardMedic bridges gaps in service provision when communicating with patients and is designed to complement rather than replace existing translation, sign language and communication support services.

This results in increased:

• Health equity
• Medication compliance
• Staff efficiency by reducing the estimated time spent searching for communication support for patients, leading ultimately to more timely discharges and transfers of care
• Patient safety, experience and quality of care, with an implied reduction in health inequalities
• Ability of staff to offer accurate and timely patient care, with an increase in staff morale
• Digital literacy of frontline healthcare

Fellow name: Rachael Grimaldi

Fellow bio: Dr Rachael Grimaldi is a senior anaesthetic registrar at Great Ormond Street Hospital, Co-Founder and CEO of multi-award-winning innovative patient communication app, CardMedic, and Brighton Marathon Associate Medical Director. Rachael has a long-held interest in human factors, patient safety and communication, winning numerous regional, national and international prizes for previous work.

DeepMedical products predict appointment non-attendance with unprecedented accuracy.

We do this using innovative Machine Learning (ML) which can analyse existing datasets to predict and compensate for missed appointments. By knowing who is not turning up ahead of time, we equip hospitals with tools that increase access to their services at no extra operational or workforce costs.

DeepMedical’s ML predictions tackle non-attendance in three ways: personalising appointment suggestions, automated scheduling, and targeted media campaigns.

Non-attendance costs the NHS £1.5 billion every year. Our predictions understand how people use health services. This understanding allows hospital administrators to double-book appointments which will be missed and target some people with reminder telephone calls.

Tackling DNAs from within hospitals is not enough to impact health inequalities. We’re reaching out to communities.

We will identify people who are at-risk of missing appointments, and are designing a media campaign that raises awareness. This campaign will be targeted and personalised, and will use ML to nudge people to attend their appointments. This is how DeepMedical creates equitable access to healthcare and cultural change.

Fellow name: Benyamin Deldar

Fellow bio: Dr Benyamin Deldar is an NHS England Clinical entrepreneur, clinician and academic. Benyamin received his medical degree from St George's University, London where he was awarded honours. He holds a master’s degree in medical Imaging Sciences, where he created a new method of segmenting myelin in MR Imaging. Benyamin was awarded a research fellowship from Johns Hopkins and has published his academic work extensively.

DOC2UK.COM was started to provide the NHS with efficient and accomplished doctors from overseas on a full-time contract. This saves a hospital, an average of £50,000 per doctor per year. I used a lean methodology and technology to make the whole recruitment journey streamlined and safe.

We are a team of NHS doctors. We are part of the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme and started DOC2UK after being enrolled in the programme.

At DOC2UK, we digitalised the whole process of overseas recruitment. Instead of Hospital staff visiting different countries outside the UK, they can identify potential candidates on our one-stop-shop platform, review their CVs and documents in one go and interview them at their convenience.

At the core, we undertake the preliminary work. We identify qualified candidates and complete their initial vetting and validating, which makes recruitment safe and streamlined.

Fellow name: Naveen Keerthi

Fellow bio: Naveen Keerthi is an International medical graduate (IMG) doctor who moved to the UK from India. In addition to working in the NHS as a T&O/ED doctor, he works at the Silverstone circuit as their racetrack doctor for Formula 1 and Moto GP races. He completed a mini MBA (Ignite programme) from Stanford University and NHS England’s Clinical Entrepreneur Fellowship. Currently, he is part of the UCLPartners Innovation Fellowship. Whilst in the programme, he founded doc2uk - an innovative, framework-approved, ISO 9001 accredited medical recruitment agency (platform).

 

EnrichMyCare is a one-stop intelligent personal health and monitoring platform that helps manage the complex health and care needs of children and young people with disabilities, rare diseases and other long-term conditions. The platform enables parents/carers to capture their child’s daily health status and their entire care journey that spans across multiple hospitals, care organizations and school. This allows professionals to easily monitor their care pathways, speeds-up care co-ordination and saves time resulting in proactive care, cost reduction and improved outcomes.   

In the UK, around 4 million families of children and young people with disabilities, rare diseases and other long term conditions experience difficulties and hardship in managing their complex health and care needs. Despite families spending 80+ hours a week in caring, and an additional £650-£1,000 a month on specialist equipment and private therapy, they experience continuous battle with the system due to constant delays and inadequate support. For the professionals, the disjointed care pathways make care co-ordination and proactive monitoring difficult. 30% of their weekly time is spent in admin tasks. This results in long waiting times leading to secondary complications and poor outcomes.

EnrichMyCare, in supporting the outcomes set forth by the Mid and South Essex (MSE) integrated care partnership, can streamline the care pathways and improve the health and care outcomes of nearly 35K children and young people and their families in Essex and Thurrock. The platform can provide annual efficiency savings of 20% across the MSE care system resulting in reducing variations in care and saving professional’s time.

Fellow name: Saran Muthiah

Fellow bio: Saran Muthiah is Founder/CEO of EnrichMyCare and also a Specialist Paediatric Physiotherapist with over 20 years of experience in managing children with neuro disorders. He is also an NHS Clinical Entrepreneur with a track record of driving innovation and service development within the NHS. He is keen in combining his cross-functional skills in clinical, technology and business to solve some of the key health and care challenges that we face today.

Hoop – the healthy event’s app for kids - is a great way for kids to attend camps, classes and events. Parents struggle to find good things for kids to do.

My mission to get kids into activities and away from TV screens, away from YouTube, from social media, from iPads, and encourage them to do activities that are healthy. Event organisers will be able to find a place to list their events and have a huge reach to parents, we predict over 1,000,000 families will use Hoop.

Hoop should become the UK's biggest kid's event platform and I hope to not only drive a large volume of kids to events, but also change the way play is done in the UK, making the UK aware of the social, physical and mental issues created by kids who spend repeated time on screens. We must encourage kids to do more activities, to educate parents, to reduce obesity, and improve mental health.

Fellow name: Tim Allardyce

Fellow bio: Tim Allardyce has been lucky enough to be an NHS England Clinical Entrepreneur for four years, and currently works as a Chartered Physiotherapist and Osteopath. He spends half of his time working in or supporting the NHS, and working part time as a physiotherapist in a Long Covid Clinic in Lewisham. He provides cover as a First Contact Practitioner, and the rest of the week he spends talking to tech guys and making progress on digital apps.

LinkMedics is a digital platform connecting British overseas trained doctors with training and employment opportunities in the NHS. LinkMedics handles doctor sourcing, compliance, on-boarding, training, and integration for NHS Trusts.

LinkMedics works collaboratively with NHS Trusts to provide a 4-week conversion course that leads to substantive only employment. The intention is to upskill overseas doctors to NHS standards before allowing partner organisations to employ them on NHS trust grade contracts to reduce trust locum/workforce expenses.

Benefit/Value of employing British doctors with a full GMC registration, and no VISA complications, who are less challenged by language and NHS culture.

Guaranteed compliance through an on-site hands-on NHS conversion course and the added benefit of displacing and replacing expensive agency doctors.

National role out would mean retaining British Doctors with fewer ethical implications of aggressive overseas recruitment from developing countries and their resource depletion.

Fellow name: Prash Ladva

Fellow bio: Prash Ladva is passionate about using innovation to improve access to clinical training, enhance patient care and tackle national NHS workforce challenges in the process. LinkMedics is a digital platform that connects overseas trained doctors with training and employment opportunities in the NHS.

Lister is a digital task management platform aiming to replace the need for unsafe, eligible, and unsustainable paper task lists.

Regardless of digital transformation, over 70% of clinicians still use paper and/or cognitive memory as a way of managing the clinical tasks required for patients.

However, with an average of 120 tasks per clinician for each 12-hour shift, tasks can be overlooked delayed or forgotten. This negatively effects patient safety and the cognitive burden on an already burnt-out workforce, not to mention how easily they are misplaced, posing a threat to patient data and delaying workflow.

By digitising this process, built with diverse clinical feedback, we aim to improve patient safety by being a digital safety for otherwise missed or delayed tasks and reducing the clinical cognitive burden. Lister will significantly reduce data security breaches from paper lists and provide a first-mover advantage in analysing the data from the clinical task.

Fellow name: Sophie Brooks-Jones

Fellow bio: Sophie Brooks-Jones is a midwife whose own working experiences have led to the motivations of becoming a digital innovator to improve our NHS and staff wellbeing. My interests lie in women's health, supporting our workforce and advocating for the Nursing and Midwifery voice in digital change and innovation.

International recruitment of healthcare professionals is part of the NHS recruitment strategy to support the 130,000+ vacancies in the UK. International recruits can find it very difficult to relocate to a different country, learn a different culture and settle into working life in the NHS. Retention is a further issue that has been identified in the NHS and care sector which has further attached explicit and implicit costs.

Medics.Academy develops and provides programmes that are designed to support, enhance, and develop careers in healthcare. Each programme is built with a variety of learning experiences to maximise education and enjoyment. Many programmes are commissioned by the NHS, HEE, or both.

The Medics.Academy NHS Acclimatisation programme aims to support internationally educated healthcare professionals with their transition to the UK to ensure a positive long-term experience for the employee and employer.

This will support staff across MSE to:

• Have an easier and more comfortable transition to the NHS and MSE
• Access ongoing support and resources over their first 18 months at MSE
• Stay within the trust long term
• Show the trust to be a leader in NHS acclimatization and retention of international recruits

Fellow name: Hiba Khan

Fellow bio: Hiba Khan is the Chief Revenue Officer at Medics.Academy, an organisation that works to support and enhance the healthcare workforce. She is also an Obstetrics and Gynaecology trainee doctor at Mid and South Essex NHS Trust (Broomfield Hospital) and an NHS England Clinical Entrepreneur.

MOAI Health is a digital platform for employers and educators that combines leading metrics of mental health deterioration with population modelling and proven mental health interventions. We turn mental health data into management information. The MOAI platform provides ongoing wellbeing monitoring and insights that reduce the uncertainty of psychological stressors in the workplace into a clear set of decisions for leaders.

Our team of clinicians, psychologists and data scientists work with leaders to change the way we protect our people. From guesswork and one-size-fits-all approaches, to data-driven and clinically grounded solutions.

We want to add to the current psychological support MSE employees receive by gathering systemic insights that facilitate a deep understanding of the specific stressors experienced at an individual, team and organisational level. We hope to offer the latest evidence-based interventions across these tiers to help support a psychologically safe and inclusive culture within the trust.

Fellow name: Patrick Davey

Fellow bio: Dr Patrick Davey is an NHS consultant psychiatrist. He is passionate about community mental health provision and exploring better ways to offer early support to our population. As well as founding MOAI Health he is an NHS clinical entrepreneur and author of Cheeky Worries, a children’s book to help kids manage unhelpful and scary thoughts.

Monitree is a new, unique, highly effective fintech app for healthcare staff. It is designed to be both smart and interactive whilst still engaging and personalised. Monitree encourages staff to optimise their financial knowledge and empowers them towards claiming all they are entitled to. By equipping staff with tools to elevate their financial wellbeing, the app will ultimately save staff money and support them in taking control of their finances.

Evidence has shown poor financial wellbeing is associated with mental health problems, reduced productivity, an increase in sick days and poor staff retention. The latest NHS staff survey revealed worryingly low morale across the workforce and the current bleak economic situation only serves to compound this effect. The number of vacancies within the NHS is the highest level on record and research has estimated the cost of financial insecurity for a trust of 15,000 staff such as MSE is approximately £6 million.

Monitree will have a significant positive impact to MSE staff by improving the morale of the workforce through improved financial security, thus also benefitting the delivery and quality of patient care. For the organization itself, it offers a cost-effective financial wellbeing solution which has huge potential financial benefits.

Fellow name: Stuart Foster and Sabrina Ahmed

Fellow bio: Stuart Foster and Sabrina Ahmed are doctors having worked collectively for 18 years in the NHS, with additional degrees in Economics and Psychology respectively. They are both NHS Clinical Entrepreneurs since 2019 and have a shared passion for transforming the perception and experience of working within the public sector through efficient innovation.

myANPguide is an app to support Advanced Nurse Practitioners (ANPs) working within general practice. We have a national workforce crisis. Most NHS treatment is provided in primary care, but we have a shortage of GPs. 1 in 6 GP vacancies remain unfilled and we have an aging workforce, with many experienced GPs due to retire.

The ANP role was developed partly to address demand and workforce issues. ANPs do not replace GPs but complement the role by sharing the burden of work as not all consultations in primary care need to be managed by a GP. ANPs are trained to triage and manage undifferentiated cases. This frees GPs up to manage the most complex cases.

Researchers have found high levels of patient satisfaction after an ANP consultation. However, there are barriers to fully optimising this role. There is role ambiguity and inconsistent training and support offered across practices.

This app supports ANPs to define their own safe scope of practice. It offers standardisation and guidance for clinical decision making and professional development. It also links ANPs together for peer support and supervision. Optimising this role enhances the skill mix within the team ultimately improving the quality of care provided to patients.

Fellow name: Liz Harrison

Fellow bio: Liz Harrison has been a registered nurse for 20 years. She has spent most of her career in community nursing, qualifying as a district nurse and then working her way up to Matron. In 2017 she became an ANP. She completed her master’s degree in 2019. Liz is married with three daughters and lives in Southend.

Commissioners in mental health, learning disability and autism do not currently have a simple yet robust system to search for available beds and get results based on postcode and complex person-centered need matching.

NEBS is a placement search software solution co-produced with industry partners, service user and family representatives, comprising a secure web-based search engine.

It is a fully functioning advanced platform which supports decision-making and aids bed managers, hospital managers, commissioners, and families to quickly and effectively identify specialist provisions to support people with complex needs, as close to their home and family as possible.

NEBS offers an ICS level solution for commissioners across health and social care.

The NEBS platform will also include a family portal for those with personal health and direct payment budgets or who are self-funding.

NEBS matches individuals based on identified health and psychosocial needs across 3 domains – Clinical need, staffing need and environmental needs, using a circa 100-question set, ensuring person centered care is found quickly and effectively.

NEBS can also be used to find step-down into community placements for those in hospital and those ready for community care.  It can also be used to bring people currently in distant care of any type, back to be close to home and their families.

Fellow name: Gary Hawkins

Fellow bio: Gary Hawkins has been a learning disability nurse in the NHS for the last 36 years.  He is also a fellow on the NHS England Clinical Entrepreneur Programme. He has extensive experience in all settings, both inpatient and community, working with the whole range of intellectual disabilities.  Gary has worked with many people with co-morbidities of mental health and autistic people, both with an intellectual disability and without.

We are building a digital care pathway and application (NeUro) co-designed with patients, families, and clinicians. We will test in real world settings across a nursing home environment. We believe it will increase access to advice, improve management, avoid complications, reduce inequalities, and reduce ED attendance. 

The NeUro application will support staff to: 

• Assess symptoms of infection  
• Order fast-track collection of urine samples 
• Access advice 24/7 by connecting to NHS 111 
• Access personalised treatment and avoid reaching crisis level 
• Avail of expert triage to avoid hospital admission, unless required 
• Ensure residents get fast treatment  

The impact of this will be:

• Early detection of UTIs, reduced time to treat, improved clinical outcomes.
• Appropriate antibiotics 
• Improved quality of life  
• Reduce ED presentations and admissions 
• Improved patient experience
• Staff will feel supported and have more time to care

Fellow name: Bernadette Porter

Fellow bio: Bernadette Porter is a Consultant Nurse with over 25 years' experience in neurology and is an NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Fellow. She is the Founder and CEO of NeuroResponse® – a digital care model co-designed with patients and families to improve quality of life for people living with long term neurological conditions.

Optirad is a workflow management tool which provides the following:

•  E-rostering with live rota to allow identification of radiologists for specific reports
• Job planning specific to radiology, with detail breaking down DCC to direct reporting time and indirect imaging activity (MDT/MDT prep etc).
• Business Intelligence: accurate and live reporting capacity by modality and subspeciality allowing you to forecast and plan for outsourcing work, new hires, skills mix within the department.
• Improved efficiency in radiology departments to maximise reporting capacity and provide business intelligence of reporting capacity to aid forward planning

Fellow name: Amy Davis

Fellow bio: Amy Davis is a radiologist and experienced medical journalist with over 10 years’ experience as an Associate Editor of The BMJ. She has also previously worked at BMJ Open as an Associate Clinical Editor focusing on large research trials.

Trust Links is an independent mental health and wellbeing charity in mid and south Essex. We would like to develop a Wellbeing Centre in an accessible central location in Southend with a high footfall (High Street, London Road, Hamlet Court Road) that delivers a range of outputs: low cost counselling services for adults and young people; space for workshops and courses to improve mental health and wellbeing run by REACH Recovery College and other partners; information resource to signpost to a range of support services; charity shop and cafe to provide work experience and build a positive and resilient community. Entering the Wellbeing Centre will be non-stigmatising and non-intimidating, as it will be open to all, regardless of need or background. 

Health inequalities are exacerbated by poor mental health, particularly in areas of multiple deprivation. People living in central Southend (Milton, Kursaal, Victoria, Westborough) experience poor health outcomes and have limited access to services and support to meet their needs, even though there is a range of health, social care, and voluntary sector services in the area.

Services are often based in clinical and austere environments, that can feel intimidating and unwelcoming to people who need them. Therefore, fewer people access them in a timely way and wait until they are at crisis point to engage with services.

Fellow name: Alex Jamieson

Fellow bio: Alex Jamieson is the Business Development Manager at TrustLinks.

Pre-employment checks are key to safeguarding patients but are time-consuming, repetitive, and costly. Truu has created a digital staff passport using verified credentials to allow clinicians to hold and share their credentials, permitting HR departments to rapidly on-board new or rotational staff. Digital verified credentials from issuing organisations like the GMC mean HR departments can reduce risk of incorrect or outdated documents being presented when staff come for their checks. NHS Digital estimates over 100,000 days of clinician’s time is taken by trainees alone in performing employment checks, causing disruption to patient care and cost through locum cover. 

Digital staff passports will allow clinicians to rotate within the MSE ICS rapidly with the highest levels of governance and auditability whether for planned rotations or new locums shifts. This will reduce the admin burden on HR staff and clinicians easing some of the strain and frustrations from taking time out or days of leave that are usually required to perform these checks.

The aim of Truu is to reduce the admin burden and time taken by HR staff and clinicians on employment checks. It aims to save time, money and frustration whilst improving the auditability of checks.

Fellow name: Henry Goodier

Fellow bio: Henry Goodier is Co-founder of Truu, a Wessex T&O registrar and an NHS Clinical Entrepreneur. He is motivated by trying to make a difference for his colleagues and patients. The frustrations he experienced during the first few years of training and when locuming have driven his innovation. He is keen to get outdoors in his down time and can often be found clearing his head running along the beach in Poole or swimming in the bay.

Dora is a UKCA marked artificial intelligence (AI) enabled autonomous conversational assistant. For patients, the experience is the same as talking to a human clinician, there is no training, apps or even a smartphone required, patients simply pick up the phone (even a landline) and speak. Dora is free from human constraints, and can call at any time, on-time, at scale.

For staff, this can free up significant time and energy spent collecting data and performing administrative tasks such as getting a patient on the line. This product is live in the NHS for routine pathways such as cataract surgery follow-up, but has potential uses across bottlenecks in multiple pathways. Our studies so far have shown Dora to be acceptable to patients, even in an elderly cohort, and potentially freeing up 60% of routine follow-up. We want to work with people across MSE to explore local pathways, and the biggest pain points that we can solve with Dora. In particular, accessibility is a core feature of the Dora platform.

In the MSE region, we’re keen to implement with a focus on equity of access, and as a digital health technology that narrows, rather than widens health inequalities.

Fellow name: Ernest Lim

Fellow bio: Ernest Lim is an ophthalmology registrar based in London and associate medical director at Ufonia. He leads Dora’s evidence generation efforts, and works on the platform’s clinical, regulatory and safety case. He has recently established and helped run a multi-site NIHR trial for Dora’s cataract follow up conversation.