NHS Innovation Accelerator announces 12 new fellows

Twelve new fellows have been announced for the NHS Innovation Accelerator 2024, representing a diverse range of health and social care solutions that could revolutionise patient care in the NHS.

Each selected fellow offers a unique solution that has been designed to tackle some of the more pressing challenges that are facing the health and care landscape today.

Jack Porter, co-director of the NHS Innovation Accelerator, said: “In a time of immense challenge, these innovations have demonstrated outcomes that show us a vision of a better NHS for both staff and patients. We are thrilled to welcome these exceptional innovators into our community and look forward to supporting their efforts to transform healthcare delivery and improve patient outcomes.”

Among the new cohort many digital health technologies will benefit from the NHS Innovation Accelerator. They include:

Tim Ringrose, Cognitant – interactive, personalised digital programmes that empower individuals with long-term conditions to self-manage their health. The programmes can also integrate with healthcare systems for seamless management.

Steve Barnett, C2-Ai – C2-Ai helps hospitals to enhance patient safety, reduce mortality and minimise clinical outcomes variation by using AI-based insights to prioritise waiting lists. It carries out patient-specific risk assessments using factors such as ethnicity and social determinants of health.

Benyamin Deldar, Deep Medical – an AI tool that identifies the risk of non-attendance and short notice cancellations. This supports smarter scheduling decisions and connectivity with patients to move patients from waiting lists and into care.

Taz Aldawoud, Doc Abode – this real-time workforce scheduling tool helps enhance capacity and productivity in the community through a web portal and smartphone app.

Julian Nesbitt, Dr Julian Platform – this digital platform offers a comprehensive suite of digital service functionalities, including patient consultation, clinical supervision, electronic health records, staff management, capacity management and more. It can integrate with, or replace, existing NHS systems.

Pete Hansell, Isla – a system that uses multimedia and clinical data to run highly automated and efficient digital pathways to support remote care and clinical decision-making at scale.

Sharlene Greenwood, Kidney Beam – an app which provides personalised kidney-specific content and support for chronic kidney disease patients.

Sandeep Konduru, Remcare – this web-based platform works by automatically risk stratifying patients with chronic diseases and those on perioperative pathways into low to high-risk groups. This allows early anaesthetic risk stratification of patients on waiting lists and regular monitoring.

Matthew Beaty, Surgery Hero – a digital clinic aiming to transform patient care by guiding individuals through surgical preparation and recovery at home.

Jack Francis, Tailored Talks – helping to streamline patient care, this digital app and platform personalises information based on self-assessment questionnaires offering symptom tracking and tailored advice.

Verena Stocker, interim director of innovation, research, life sciences and strategy, NHS England and interim CEO of the Accelerated Access Collaborative, said: “Since its launch, the NHS Innovation Accelerator has supported nearly one hundred innovators to test if their ideas can be successfully adopted by and across the NHS. The accelerator programme supports the development of promising innovations that address key priorities with the potential to transform the way the NHS delivers healthcare today and for future generations.”

Each year the NHS Innovation Accelerator includes an assessment of the innovation’s readiness in meeting this criteria.

This year for the first time, the programme is using an automated compliance platform from Naq, to help reduce the time and cost burden on the NHS Innovation Accelerator and innovators on achieving Digital Technology Assessment Criteria (DTAC). By automating over 80% of the manual work necessary to comply with frameworks such as GDPR, Cyber Essentials, Data Security Protection Toolkit (DSPT) and DTAC, NAQ can reduce time and costs with meeting compliance.