London, UK , Oct. 04, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Huma, a global leader in healthcare AI and digital health solutions, is pleased to announce its acquisition of eConsult, one of the largest digital-first triage and automated consultation platforms across primary and emergency care. This acquisition is set to further advance the National Health Service (NHS) as one of the world’s most proactive health systems—digital-first, AI-first, and most importantly, patient-first.
The eConsult acquisition follows Huma’s strategic acquisition of iPlato, the UK’s leading provider of screening, appointment booking, medicines management and communication tools installed in the majority of UK GP practices. This expansion solidifies Huma’s mission to accelerate the adoption of digital solutions across the healthcare landscape. Huma is implemented in more than two-thirds of all primary and secondary care providers in the UK.
Introducing Huma Workspace
In addition to this acquisition, Huma has recently launched the Huma Cloud Platform and Huma’s Workspace, which enables primary care providers (GPs), community and secondary care providers (NHS Trusts), and Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) to access a comprehensive array of digital health solutions. These include appointment booking, automated prescriptions, screening tools, teleconsultation, remote monitoring, virtual wards (for hospitals), patient education and disease management apps for rare, chronic and acute conditions, messaging tools, and electronic data capture (EDC) for clinical research and more.
With the integration of triage and automated consultation features from eConsult, Huma Workspace is designed to streamline care, improve outcomes, and significantly increase efficiency across clinical settings. Powered by Huma intelligence (known as Hi), the platform automates time-consuming tasks such as documentation, smart reports, and communication, aiming to boost clinical productivity and staff efficiency by up to tenfold, while ensuring end-to-end management of various tasks.
Huma Workspace offers a proactive care model and set of automation solutions tailored to primary care (GPs), community hospitals, and secondary care facilities. The platform is integrated with major hospital systems and primary care EMR providers, such as SystemOne, EMIS, Epic, CompuGroup Medical, Oracle and many more. Additionally, it stands out as the first platform of its kind embedded into the NHS app, creating a seamless digital front door for patients and healthcare providers alike from existing solutions in the ecosystem.
Huma CEO & Founder Dan Vahdat commented: “This acquisition brings us one step closer to becoming the end-to-end technology platform for the industry to deliver digital-first care at scale seamlessly. We believe that when Digital and AI are scaled, they become affordable for both the poor and the rich. Care delivery remains consistent and will help us transition medicine from being reactive to proactive.”
While eConsult CEO Dr Murray Ellender added: “The NHS knows it needs to do much more with technology to help both patients and clinicians. We have strong roots in both primary and secondary care and have delivered over 50m digital consultations in the NHS. Joining forces with Huma is an amazing opportunity for both our users and our teams to accelerate the shift to digital first healthcare.”
For GP practices, Huma Workspace enables:
- Seamless Digital Front Door: using Huma Workspace, GPs can set up a personalised practice page, MyGP app (by Huma), or NHS app as the first communication and engagement channel with patients, supporting the NHS vision for Modern General Practice. Through these channels patients can initiate contact and access care via a built-in triage engine, ensuring the most proactive care in the shortest time, enabling GPs to focus on more complex cases and care for twice as many patients.
- Communication Suite: gives clinicians the tools to manage patients remotely – full messaging suite, video, scheduling, tight integration into the patient record, automation and more.
- Proactive Engagement & Campaigns: GP practices can communicate directly with patients and run screening, education, and engagement campaigns, driving proactive and personalised care. Bringing back the love to what and how a health system delivers for their users.
- Increasing clinical capacity by providing more than just technology: GP practices can access Huma’s centralised GP and nurse workforce to supplement their own teams, while also interacting with Huma Workspace to jointly deliver the best care to patients, especially during times when additional capacity is needed.
- Regulated digital health applications for better disease management: Enabling GPs to design and launch MHRA Class 2b-regulated applications across key conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, respiratory diseases, and CKD, empowering patients to self-manage and monitor their conditions better together with their GP.
- Clinical Trials: This also enables GPs to actively participate in research programmes and potentially increase their practice’s research revenue.
For ICBs, Community and Secondary Care, Huma Workspace enables:
- Screening Programmes: Secondary care facilities can launch screening programs for a variety of diseases, ranging from cancer to cardiometabolic conditions and beyond.
- Check in and triage capability: for all Emergency Department attendances. Capturing patient demographics and clinical history results in a priority score that transforms the flow – identifying the sickest patients within minutes of arrival and ensuring the waiting room remains safe 24/7.
- Virtual ward offering, remote patient monitoring and self-management tools: Hospitals can rapidly launch MHRA, EUMDR Class 2b cleared applications for diabetes, hypertension, CKD, respiratory, cardiac, rare diseases, and many other conditions, helping patients manage their health and share insights with clinical teams to drive proactive management.
- Increasing clinical capacity by providing more than just technology: Health systems can access Huma centralised nurse support capacity or in hospital nurse services to increase their clinical personnel. Interacting with Huma Workspace, this added capacity can offer a digital first line of care on their behalf.
Hurley Group First to Adopt Huma Workspace Solutions
The Hurley Group is one of the UK’s most innovative GP practice groups and is among the first health systems to adopt the full suite of Huma Workspace solutions. GP practices, NHS trusts and ICBs are encouraged to register their interest and join the waiting list for early access to the future of digital and AI-first care with Huma. Together we can bring actionable data, AI capability and service transformation to benefit patients.
Dame Clare Gerada, Partner at Hurley Group, commented: “I’m proud to be part of this exciting initiative to help develop the innovation needed for our future health. The recent Darzi report has stressed the importance of transforming health care and moving from analogue to digital. With the Hurley I envisage us co-designing a range of frontline capabilities that could genuinely transform how care is experienced by patients and delivered by our teams.”
ENDS
About Huma
Huma is a global healthcare AI company on a mission to accelerate the adoption of digital solutions in care and research. Huma’s technology powers over 4,500 hospitals and clinics globally and has screened, triaged, and engaged over 50 million individuals across 70+ countries. The company plays a pivotal role in national healthcare projects across the US, UK, Germany, Greece, and Saudi Arabia and collaborates with leading pharmaceutical companies and CROs.
Huma’s solutions are live in more than 80 NHS Trusts and across two-thirds of primary care practices. The Huma Cloud Platform is built on a strong regulatory foundation, achieving FDA 510(k) Class II, EU MDR Class IIb, Saudi FDA Class C, and India CDSCO Class C clearances, making it a robust platform to launch healthcare solutions quickly and safely.
About eConsult
eConsult www.econsult.net is the UK’s leading digital triage platform in healthcare, used by over 1,800 NHS GP practices and a growing number of NHS Acute Trusts. In General Practice it enables patients to consult with their healthcare provider remotely, ensuring that they receive the care they need promptly and to date has delivered 50m consultations in this setting. The structured history collected from patients ensures the right patient gets to the right clinician first time, every time.
In hospitals the triage details are collected on kiosks in the Emergency Department waiting room – ensuring all patients arriving in this setting are booked in and triaged within 5 minutes of arrival. This improves flow through the department, ensures safety in the waiting room and delivers a return on investment for the hospital Trust. Across 14 hospitals, 1 million patients have been digitally triaged to date.
