The two companies will operate individually, but integrate their expertise to deliver more personalised care across primary and secondary care
iPLATO offers patient engagement software. (Credit: mohamed Hassan from Pixabay.)
Huma has acquired patient engagement software provider iPLATO Healthcare to advance digital-first delivery of care and remote patient monitoring for NHS patients in the UK.
UK-based iPLATO offers its software to a network of 26.6m patients across nearly 3,000 National Health Service (NHS) primary care organisations.
It also provides myGP app in the UK, to help manage health, reduce needless appointments, administrative tasks, along with medication reminders, vital signs tracking and prescriptions.
The app is being used by around 2.4 million people in England.
Huma Therapeutics is a global digital health technology firm engaged in developing digital biomarkers, predictive algorithms and real-world data.
It offers a modular platform that supports digital ‘hospital at home’ for wide range of use cases across different disease areas and powers decentralised clinical trials and studies in life sciences.
With the acquisition, the two companies will operate as independent entities, but combine their expertise to deliver more personalised care across primary and secondary care.
iPLATO Healthcare CEO Tobias Alpsten said: “We recently launched patient questionnaires on the myGP platform to enable patient data to be coded directly into the patients’ medical records.
“Combining tools like this with digital biomarkers can help create a world where we can tackle the biggest killers of our time – cancer, heart disease and now, Covid-19.
“We see a time when data collection highlights people at high risk, so those individuals can be offered personalised screening, treatment, advice, support and continual follow-up remotely – even alerting clinicians when patients need to be seen in-person.
“Bringing our patient questionnaires together with Huma’s remote patient monitoring capability means that this future is not too far away.”
Huma claims that its technology has almost doubled clinical capacity through virtual wards and helped clinicians identify and reprioritise their cardiac surgery patients on waiting lists.
Its technology is used across the UK, Europe, US, Asia and the Middle East.
Huma said that iPLATO has played a major role in increasing uptake of NHS services, including IAPT services, cancer screenings and health checks, through its myGP platform.
Huma CEO and founder Dan Vahdat said: “We’ve already shown how we can help clinicians care for more people whilst offering greater reassurance and oversight from monitoring even when patients are away from the clinic. But there is still so much more we can do.
“We want to introduce digital screening and our peer-reviewed cardiovascular and depression risk scores to give patients even more insight into their own health.
“Adding these capabilities to iPLATO’s patient engagement expertise gives us a fantastic opportunity to make a significant difference in primary care and help more patients to live longer, fuller lives.”
In September last year, Huma has teamed up with life sciences company Bayer to improve diagnosis and precision treatment for certain types of lung cancer.
The collaboration intended to leverage machine learning, and more precise readings of CT scans to distinguish different forms of non-small-cell lung carcinomas (NSCLCs).