E-consent company founded by Welsh surgeon receives £350k funding

An electronic consent company has received £350,000 funding from Innovate UK.

Co-founded by Welsh surgeon Dafydd Loughran, Concentric, is a platform which provides a paper-free consent process and still ensures that patients faced with the possibility of surgery can make shared decisions with their clinicians.

As well as empowering patients, Concentric also aims to save health boards in Wales money.

Loughran, who undertook an artificial intelligence fellowship at Babylon Health in London, said the funding would allow the start-up to “scale up from a pilot at Imperial Healthcare NHS Trust across interested Welsh health boards and internationally”.

Loughran is joined at Concentric by co-founder Edward St John, an NHS and academic surgeon, and an expanding software engineering and user experience team.

St John said: “As a clinician I’m excited to be delivering a world-leading evidence base to support patients. Published evidence demonstrates that patients engaged in shared decisions often make less invasive decisions, leading to both better outcomes aligned with their priorities, and projected savings of up to £11.6bn a year across the NHS.

“For health boards, Concentric allows the consent process to go paperless, with an audit trail of the discussions held and decisions made.”

Innovate UK is the UK’s innovation agency and has funded a number of digital health project, including a consortium led by Cambridge Bio-Augmentation Systems (CBAS) which is developing a machine learning system that analyses the daily movements of patients with orthoses and those at risk of falls.

Innovate UK’s Manager for Wales, Jon Wood, said: “I’m delighted that Innovate UK are supporting Concentric here in Wales.

“The open competition is very competitive, so this funding is a great endorsement for Concentric and its innovative approach to data-driven surgical decision making.”