2022: Progress and partnership

As 2022 comes to a close, we at Huma would like to take a moment to reflect on the progress we’ve made over the last 12 months in driving a digital-first approach to care and research, enabling people to live longer, fuller lives. 

The amount of healthcare being delivered outside of hospitals is accelerating, and boundaries between primary, community and social care are blurring, so providing reliable and useful tools to patients and clinicians to support health prevention programmes and optimise patient management is vital. To build on Huma’s digital health platform,  we welcomed the incredible employees at iPLATO into the Huma family at the start of the year. iPLATO’s platform is proven to increase patient engagement and clinician management. We will share more exciting news of how the combined iPLATO and Huma platforms are helping more people take control of their health in the coming months.

Optimising decentralized clinical trials to deliver new medicines

In March, we announced our pioneering partnership with the world-leading pharmaceutical company, AstraZeneca, which is truly visionary in its embrace of digital technologies to improve medicines discovery and development. Rather than build these capabilities in-house, AZ has partnered with us to become their digital arm to deploy digital health tools to engage patients in care and treatment, and advance diversity through hybrid and decentralized clinical trials. Through our digital platform, AZ will be able to leverage clinical research data faster and more effectively, ultimately enabling them to bring new, personalised medicines to patients more quickly.

As AZ’s Director of Commercial Digital Health, Abby Staible, describes our first-of-its-kind agreement has tested the meaning of partnership: we’ve had to learn how to understand each other’s language and different processes and through this we’ve made each other stronger with a shared vision centred on the patient. Next year, our work will come to life in the hands of patients, when we launch Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) companion apps targeted at several therapeutic areas. The dream starts to become a reality!

‍Virtual wards benefit the patient and the system

Throughout the year, we’ve been delighted to see the benefits our platform brings to patients’ lives through virtual wards. In helping manage his heart failure, 80-year-old patient,  Alun Morgan, said using the Huma app was “brilliant” and it has saved him “many trips to hospital”. Similarly, 69-year old David Watkins, said “Remote monitoring has truly changed my life after a triple bypass.”  Alun and David were part of a virtual ward which used our technology to optimise patient medications in days rather than months, reduced outpatient appointments by 19% and helped 10% of patients to avoid hospital admission, with a further 5% discharged early to be monitored safely at home.

As well as improving the patient experience, virtual wards make a huge difference for clinical teams under increasing pressure across the UK’s National Health Service (NHS); Trusts have been tasked to provide between 40 - 50 virtual ward beds per 100,000 population by December 2023.  As our Vice President, Primary Care & Clinical Partnerships, Dr Harpreet Sood, explained, the question is no longer will virtual wards work but rather how? This summer, we partnered with Xyla Elective Care’s hospital network, to deliver virtual wards to more patients. We also announced a 5-year partnership with Tamer Healthcare to bring virtual wards to the people of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We will be sharing more news of how we are helping expand virtual wards with additional partners early next year.

Finally, integrating digital technology into the health ecosystem relies on the partnership of payers and regulators who require a compelling evidence base that both measures and articulates the worth of a digital intervention. At Huma, we continue to capture millions of different data points and hundreds of hours of qualitative and quantitative insights to advance our products, and again this year we are proud that our scientists and physicians have continued to add to the growing body of biomedical literature underpinning the digital health value proposition.  We look forward to a productive partnership with payers and regulators next year and to sharing new, robust data in the pursuit of digitally-improved care and research.

This is just a flavour of Huma’s work in 2022 to show how digital technology is providing tremendous value in the healthcare chain. We want to thank all our colleagues at Huma and our amazing partners across established healthcare systems, pharma, academia, regulatory agencies, clinical research organisations and others for having the insight and the vision to adopt our digital platforms to benefit our most important partner - the patient.