The investments will be used to expand the company’s operations in Greater Manchester and to aid healthcare professionals in delivering programmes of remote care, support and behaviour change for people with long term conditions through its unique use of its AI powered clinical software.
The investment follows the backing of UKRI through a £530,000 grant to develop an AI platform that provides healthcare professionals with recommendations for managing patients with long term conditions at the point of care. The company is disrupting the way that AI is developed in healthcare, favouring an approach where AI is used to assist healthcare professionals rather than replace healthcare professionals.
The UKRI-funded project, under the Digital Health Technology Catalyst (DHTC) programme, part of the Medicines Manufacturing Challenge, helped the company to develop the machine learning algorithms that power recommendations in its patient management system by crowdsourcing the training of the algorithms using inputs from networks of healthcare professionals. This disrupts the approach to AI in healthcare by putting healthcare professionals in control of the development and training of the artificial intelligence and ensuring that trust, privacy, safety and diversity come first when using AI to support patients to manage their conditions. The company believes that this approach can help to overcome the issues around trust and algorithmic bias in existing AI solutions that have been developed for use in healthcare.
The investments will also help to bolster Healum’s existing clinical research partnerships with NIHR, Greater Manchester CRN and Vernova Healthcare CIC, with whom it is delivering a randomised control trial as part of its Innovate UK project to assess the impact of Healum’s smart remote patient management solutions in aiding primary care teams to improve health outcomes for patients with type 2 diabetes. Over the next year, the company will build on its partnerships across the region to launch a live learning research network that powers the inference models behind its integrated patient management system and care planning software.
The company chose Greater Manchester rather than London as a base for its future operations, citing the devolved and integrated nature of the region’s health and social care provision as the main reason for the decision. Anuj Saboo, CTO and co-founder of Healum, commented: “Greater Manchester is the only place in the UK that can provide us the data partnerships, research support, diverse population and integrated health and social care practices that will enable us to give healthcare professionals the control and trust in the unbiased intelligence that powers our patient management system.”
Healum was previously part of the Greater Manchester Future of Healthcare Programme run by UP Ventures Group, where the team came to understand the benefits of focussing its efforts in the North and were introduced to investors Catapult Ventures and Maven Capital Partners. Danny Meaney, CEO at UP Ventures Group said: "Congratulations to Jonathan and the team at Healum. It was clear to us at UP that Healum had a world class healthtech product as well as the drive and business intelligence to see it through to success. We are delighted to have played our part by opening the right doors to match the team with the right investors."
If your business is in need of finance to help unlock its growth potential, NPIF Maven Equity Finance may be able to help. Contact Maven’s local team today on 0161 233 3500.