Care City and Healthy.io partnership explores new solutions for ageing patients of East London.

Using a smartphone app to facilitate better care coordination for patients with long term conditions.

2nd January 2020 – Care City, in partnership with Healthy.io, is testing several new technological solutions to facilitate better care coordination as well as prevention and management of chronic disease for residents of East London. Working collaboratively with personal carers, general practice, community nursing teams and nurses, they are testing the use of smartphone cameras as portable testing devices.

People with long-term conditions are significant users of both health and social care services: for every £10 spent on health and social care, around £7 is spent on people with long-term conditions. They also account for around 50% of all GP appointments, 64% of all outpatient appointments and 70% of all inpatient bed days.

As a healthy ageing innovation centre, Care City’s mission is to transform the health and wellbeing of our east London population who generally live shorter lives and live more of these years in ill health compared to the national average. This mission has resulted in a partnership with healthcare technology company Healthy.io, embarking on a joint program to assess different technologies with the potential to aid the ageing and caregiver communities.

This partnership began one year ago with the stated mission of detecting and preventing long term conditions by educating and supporting both paid and unpaid caregivers with new technology to improve health outcomes across the East London population. The partnership is currently examining three key services that empower patients, medical professionals and caregivers by using the smartphone camera as a portable testing device: urinalysis, Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) screening, and wound management.

• Carers in 3 care agencies in East London have been extensively trained to use Healthy.io’s 10 parameter urinalysis dipstick, providing GPs with a rich dataset of results upon which they can decide to intervene in patient care.
• 4 local GP practices have partnered with Healthy.io to facilitate screening for CKD among high-risk populations using Healthy.io’s home ACR testing kit. According to a YHEC study published in 2018, using the kit among at-risk populations could prevent 11,376 cases of end-stage kidney disease and identify 276,790 cases of undiagnosed kidney disease within 5 years.
• Working with NELFT District Nurses in Hawkwell Court, Waltham Forest to explore new ways of assisting tissue viability nurses to monitor and assess wounds. Katherine Ward, Chief Commercial Officer and European GM, Healthy.io, said: “We are delighted to partner with Care City and to provide local healthcare professionals with new tools to improve care for the community in East London.”

Hannah Harniess, Deputy Chief Executive, Care City commented “Technology which can help GP’s, carers and nurses more accurately monitor and manage the health of their patients and provide pro-active and rapid treatment and support can not only reduce cost burdens on the NHS, but improve health outcomes for the patient. We are therefore delighted to be able to support NELFT and Healthy.io to implement and evaluate the use of this digital technology in our East London communities.”

Katherine Ward, Chief Commercial Officer and European GM, Healthy.io, said: “We are delighted to partner with Care City and to provide local healthcare professionals with new tools to improve care for the community in East London.”

About Care City

Care City is an innovation centre for healthy ageing and regeneration and works as the innovation partner to East London's health and care system. Every project it takes on is about improving both health and the determinants of health. It is currently working on projects to improve - variously - the built environment, community cohesion and economic development alongside improving health. Over time it wants to help to build a system of anchor institutions across East London. It became a Community Interest Company in June 2019.

About Healthy.io

Using smartphone technology to provide powerful medical insight is Healthy.io’ s raison d’etre. Its main focus is finding innovative ways to improve and extend access to colour-based medical diagnostics. When the founder set up the company in 2013, Yonatan Adiri’s initial task was to gather a first-class team of like-minded individuals around him who shared not only his passion for technology but also his belief that the camera in a smartphone has the potential to revolutionise healthcare. Healthy.io has more than 100 employees.

Katherine Ward, Healthy.io’s Chief Commercial Officer and Managing Director for the UK and Europe, has over 26 years’ experience of working in both the public and private healthcare sectors in the UK.

Katherine spent 15 years in the NHS before becoming Chief Executive Officer of United Health UK and latterly Chief Growth Officer for Optum International, a health services company where she led global expansion across 26 countries.

Healthy.io’s headquarters are in Tel Aviv and it also has offices in the UK and US.