12 Scottish digital health and wellness tech companies to watch
With growing demand for innovative tech solutions in telehealth, personalised medicine, assisted living and digital health systems, Scotland’s smartest healthtech companies are rising to the challenge, supporting global healthcare providers and improving patients' lives worldwide.
Scotland’s expertise in turning health data into clinical insights is far-reaching. We have a well-established and growing community of 250 digital health and medtech companies helping to:
- Improve patient health
- Improve patient experience
- Reduce costs
- Increase impact and ROI
- Streamline services
Meet Scotland’s rising stars in digital health
Scottish medtech startup, Current Health, has its sights on US markets as it plans to expand its headcount and open a headquarters in New York.
Current Health has developed an AI-enabled wearable medical device that continuously and wirelessly monitors the health (vital signs) of a patient.
Current Health has raised a total of $23.2 million USD in funding over five rounds. Their latest funding round (Series A round) in December, 2019, $11.5 million USD (£9 million) was led by MMC Ventures and Legal & General supported by early investors Par Equity and the Scottish Investment Bank.
Current Health gained FDA approval for in-hospital use in November 2018 and Class II clearance in April 2019, for post-acute care in what Current Health is calling "the first-ever FDA clearance for end-to-end, real-time, passive [remote patient monitoring] wearable and platform."
The company is now looking to capitalise on the wider telehealth opportunity.
Blackford Analysis, based in Edinburgh, provides a single platform to help healthcare professionals find the right medical image analysis applications and AI algorithms to add clinical value.
Applications can help healthcare providers such as radiologists, clinicians and healthcare IT departments automate workflows to:
- Improve efficiencies
- Help advance surgical standards
- Improve patient outcomes
- Reducing care costs
The company was spun out from the University of Edinburgh in 2010 by CEO Ben Panter. Investment from Archangel Investors (Archangels), TRI Cap, Scottish Enterprise and Old College Capital has helped fuel the company’s growth ambitions.
Edinburgh tech company, Care Sourcer is a care comparison and matching site - using data to match people to care providers - the first of its kind in the UK.
The platform is open to anyone, including private individuals, GPs and social workers. They can request care for the elderly, for example, through the website. Care seekers receive offers from local care providers within 48 hours, resulting in better outcomes for people’s health and wellbeing.
It also helps reduce NHS hospital delayed discharge times so patients can return home quicker. “Delayed discharge” which forces the NHS to cancel operations and increase waiting times in A&E costs NHS England a staggering £3 billion per year (that’s £8 million per day). An NHS-Care Sourcer pilot has shown a 40% reduction in delayed discharge.
The company recently raised funds from two investors, Legal & General and ADV, closing a £8.5 million funding round – the largest ever Series A funding round to be received by a digital tech company in Scotland.
The company currently operates in London, Edinburgh and Gloucester and plans to rollout throughout the UK, as well as develop the technology and expand its team of care experts and technologists.
Through data volume, aggregation and AI, Care Sourcer will be able to help commissioners, health economists and providers plan for an ageing demographic, optimising budgets and capacity.
Cohesion Medical is an innovative award-winning digital health and care solutions company based in Glasgow, Scotland. It offers frictionless exchange of information between citizens and service providers through its unified open data ecosystem.
This interoperable architecture connects Cohesion Medical’s Personal Health Wallet, Integrated Care Workspace, Third Party apps/devices and its AI-driven Data Insights Generator to support improved patient experience, clinical decision-making, service efficiency and make global health more affordable.
Edinburgh-headquartered, Craneware delivers specialist software solutions predominantly for the US healthcare market. The company is actively engaging with healthcare providers looking to optimise financial performance, capitalising on the trend towards value-based care in the US.
The company’s sales soared 30% in last six months of 2019, with strong performance across its core products. And the number of hospitals renewing contracts in the last six months was also up.
Craneware’s flagship solution, Chargemaster Toolkit, has earned ‘Best in KLAS’ ranking in for 12 of the past 13 years and is part of its value-cycle management suite, helping to make procurement and billing systems more efficient.
Medtech firm EnMovi (the latest venture from US-based parent company OrthoSensor Inc) has chosen Glasgow to advance its development of cutting-edge orthopaedic sensors and data analytics.
The company secured £2.5 million R&D support from Scottish Enterprise and will use a new £8 million R&D base in the heart of Glasgow’s innovation district, to work on its products.
EnMovi will benefit greatly through co-location with similar businesses at the University of Strathclyde’s Inovo building. It will also benefit from close collaboration with the university's academics, world-leading research and high-skilled health tech graduates.
“The support provided by Scottish Enterprise and our long-standing collaboration with the prestigious University of Strathclyde will enable us to continue the development of our innovative data analytics and wearable platform to improve patient outcomes globally.”
Roman Bensen, chief executive officer of EnMovi Ltd
MyWay Digital Health is an award-winning online self-management platform. It gives people with diabetes secure access to their own medical records and home recorded data, together with tailored information, advice and multimedia education resource access.
MyDiabetesMyWay (MDMW), their flagship product, developed with NHS Scotland, is the only self-management platform globally to be scaled across an entire country (Scotland) now with more than 50,000 registrants.
It offers patients multimedia education, institutional (NHS) health record access, integrates with home-recorded data (e.g. Fitbits, home glucose meters), using algorithms and data linkage to drive highly tailored self-management advice and reports.
MDMW is low cost, scalable, and improves health with significant health cost savings.
MyWay Diabetes platform has been assessed as the top app to use in clinical practice, according to a report published by ORCHA in collaboration with the Association of UK Dietitians (BDA).
The company has sealed a key partnership with Pulse Active Station supporting diabetes care in India.
Meanwhile, MyWay Digital Health is one of six healthtech companies selected out of 86 applicants worldwide for the AI Accelerator Programme based at the University of Edinburgh Bayes centre in partnership with Scale Space.
MindMate App engages dementia patients through games, fitness tracking and educational content such as dietary advice. Clinically proven to be effective, Mind Mate's award- winning app allows clinicians to analyse dementia onset.
MindMate is a mobile-first patient research platform with close ties to the University of Glasgow, University of Strathclyde and the Digital Health & Care Institute (DHI). It captures multi-dimensional patient profiles based on medical and behavioural data through gamification and AI/machine learning.
As a diagnostic model the platform can detect cognitive decline early and track disease onset and progression. This means that high-quality (pre-screened) users can be placed in open clinical trials significantly faster.
Targeted at the baby boomer generation, it’s the leading health app in 17 countries with around 1 million users. The company works with several biotech and pharmaceutical companies worldwide including US, UK and Australia.
MindMate sees opportunities in pharma - matching patients to open clinical trials, and the collection of real-world evidence for new drugs and treatment methods. Health insurance market is another opportunity the company are exploring.
The company has already raised 2 million USD (£1.5 million) in the US and is looking to raise series A funding soon.
Originally from the US, now with new operations in Edinburgh, Spiritus provides healthcare industry leaders with medical safety assurance - pioneering digital service records and analytics for healthcare, clinical labs and life sciences. They give industry leaders assurance that safety, security and compliance measures are in place across the operating life of their assets and facilities, at the point of care delivery.
In 2017, Spiritus announced plans to invest £3.4 million in a new programming and development centre in Scotland, focused on medical safety.
“With its outstanding talent pool, strong collaboration between businesses and universities, and the strategic inward investment through Scottish Enterprise, Scotland stood out to us as a superior location,” said Susan Ramonat, CEO of Spiritus.
“Another major factor was The Data Lab, an innovation centre charged with developing Scotland’s data analytics talent by bringing together industry, academia and the public sector,” she added.
“Thanks to its visionary leadership team, The Data Lab has made huge progress in executing against its mandate and distinguished itself as world-class – much to the benefit of entrepreneurial ventures like Spiritus.“
Susan Ramonat, CEO of Spiritus
Edinburgh-based firm, Storm ID has developed a data sharing platform to support delivery of healthcare services.
Its Lenus Health platform supports delivery of new digital health services that are continuous, preventative and participatory, and help transform care pathways for long term conditions, such as COPD.
The platform enables patient-generated health data from digital technologies and consumer health tech, such as wearables and devices, to be shared with health professionals and machine learning models. This helps inform decision-making to enable targeted interventions in the community.
The platform is designed to support services that help:
- Reduce unnecessary hospital admissions and face to face appointments
- Improve patient engagement with their own health and wellbeing
- Reduce duplication and unnecessary processes through user managed access to patient data
Lenus Health is built using an API-first approach and is open to other developers to innovate on. It's designed for privacy to empower people to be in control of their data and authorise who, and what, they are sharing their data with. It enforces standards such as FHIR HL7.
The platform is connected to the electronic health records of Europe’s largest health board.
Storm ID and Israeli AI startup, Zebra Medical Vision will co-develop a preventative care service to identify people at risk of osteoporosis. Using machine learning/AI methodologies, the revolutionary service will analyse medical imaging data and patient records to help clinical teams identify and treat people with risk of fractures before they happen.
The international, multidisciplinary team of clinicians, data scientists and computer scientists will work together over two years, running clinical trials, implementing the service in both NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and Assuta Medical Centres.
Storm ID has also started rolling out its new digital dermatology service across Scotland providing remote access to dermatologists.
Edinburgh-based firm, Wallscope is using innovative tech to make it easier to search, discover and link data in real time. It uses artificial intelligence/machine learning and semantic technologies to create a user interface with knowledge graphs and linked data applications. This helps its users navigate complex information to discover new and unexpected insights.
For example, for healthcare providers it can drill through millions of lines of data such as workforce data, prescription data and drugs codes then flip it into meaningful charts, maps and visual layers that can help inform service improvements for patients.
With a focus on lowering barriers to accessing knowledge, the company is currently working across healthcare, cultural, financial and academic sectors to embed its technology within organisations where it can really make a difference.
Waracle is one of the UK's largest mobile apps and digital products developers. It designs, develops and manages mobile apps and other digital products, working with some of the UK’s largest businesses across sectors including fintech, digital health and energy.
Waracle develops scalable digital solutions across the spectrum of emerging technologies including mobile, Internet of Things (IoT), augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain and machine learning.
In December 2019, it received a £4.8 million ($6 million USD) investment from BGF, the UK and Ireland’s most active investor in growing businesses, to support its long-term growth plans.
Founded in Dundee in 2007, the business has since scaled across Scotland with more than 140 people in offices in Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and London.
NHS Scotland researchers approached the company looking for a smarter, more efficient way of gathering real-time patient data. Working closely with them, Waracle created a mobile app that would collect the data, share it in real time to a private database, and provide researchers with the rapid, easy access they required to meet the complex demands of ongoing, long-term research.
While working at NHS Tayside, Dr Roger Flint came up with the idea for an innovative product to manage pain relief for patients nearing the end of their lives born out of the risks involved in calculating and prescribing opioid drugs.
Waracle’s job was to translate Dr Flint’s concept into a fully realised mobile app that worked across multiple platforms including iOS, Android and web.
Waracle worked closely with Dr Flint to develop SPOT (The Safer Prescription of Opioids Tool) to support medical professionals making complex, high-risk, clinical decisions. Waracle created a simple and accessible way of calculating opioid conversions quickly, record the data, and replace the need for time-intensive manual double-checking. A life-saving time saver.
Following extensive trials across a number of health boards, SPOT: Doctor Flint Limited is now ready for deployment at scale as part of NHS Scotland's response to the coronavirus pandemic.
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