Tech that ‘unlocks’ medication data gets £1m funding

A new technology that can ‘unlock’ medication records has been awarded £1m in funding by Innovate UK.

Developed by UK-based startup CONNECT Care, the technology takes data siloed in medical records and transforms it into contextualised, personalised information.

This helps patients and health professionals make crucial links between medicines and their impact on an individual’s wider health.

In a national first, the secure online platform will use a patient’s NHS number to make the information available.

Issa Dasu-Patel, CEO of ConnectCare, said:

“Prescribed medicines are the most common intervention in healthcare; there are billions of medicines being taken by millions of people every year.

“But medicines have been excluded from the digital health revolution.

“We are joining the dots and unlocking the vast benefits that better insights on medicines can bring to patients and health professionals.

“Using just an NHS number, we can create personalised, contextualised insights that will help people stay well.”

The funding was awarded in two phases, with £615k invested in late 2022, followed by an additional half a million pounds (£495k) injection in recent weeks.

Currently, data are either hard to access, or kept in paper format: making it extremely difficult to get information to where it’s needed.

Consequently, people aren’t alerted to the potential side effects of a new medicine or the possible interactions it may have with medicines they are already taking.

Using an individual’s actual medical records, CONNECT Care’s technology unlocks existing prescription data held by GPs, pharmacists and other health teams.

Via a software platform, they can then provide crucial insights to patients and care teams, such as whether a new prescription may increase a patient’s likelihood of falling.

The aim of the process is to ‘digitise the brain of a pharmacist’ and help people reduce additional health complications that poor access to medicines insights can create.

Dasu-Patel added:

“We’re so grateful to receive this additional Innovate UK backing so we can scale this application of our software and move a step closer towards creating a single source of truth for medicines data in the UK.”