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Why we acquired iPLATO (myGP)

First published:
February 11, 2022
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Huma’s acquisition of iPLATO (myGP) opens up a world of new possibilities. Welcoming iPLATO to the Huma family will help us accelerate digital-first delivery of healthcare and research and bring ‘hospitals at home’ and decentralized clinical trials to even more customers. Together we will demonstrate how the combination of two technologies can be leveraged to enable the shift from reactive to truly personalised, proactive delivery of healthcare and research.

In 2021 we published research detailing the predictive models we created to assess an individual’s short- and long-term risk of being affected by cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and developing complications from COVID-19, or to understand general wellness with a risk model on all-cause mortality. The peer-reviewed papers demonstrated high accuracy levels but for us, this was just the beginning. Over the last year, we have been working on improving these models, applying cutting edge machine learning approaches with highly promising preliminary results and further publications in the pipeline. Our ultimate goal is to provide individuals with clinically-validated digital tools that can be used for initial screening at population level and increasing risk awareness to empower people to take control over their own health.

iPLATO reaches more than 26m people in its network and increases the use of healthcare services by up to 65%. The impact of this was seen when an extra 13,000 women in London undertook cervical screening after being contacted through myGP’s service. We understand that population screening programmes provide significant benefits but they are not perfect and come with challenges. The risks and benefits need to be evaluated and reviewed regularly by expert bodies. Using digital tools at scale can enable better identification of individuals at risk and therefore delivery of more targeted approaches, with the individual in the driving seat.

Leveraging the ever-maturing smartphone technologies sitting in our pockets, we can put personal, often actionable, information at people’s fingertips and all of this can be done in the comfort of their own home. Through quick and engaging assessments, individuals can better understand their risk trajectories for a variety of different conditions, receive recommendations on how to reduce and alter their risk trajectory by making better lifestyle choices or if needed, book an appointment using myGP to see their doctor (virtually or in-person) for further assessments.

Despite anyone’s best efforts, people will still fall ill. When they do, the primary care physician can prescribe Huma’s remote monitoring technology so that clinicians and patients can monitor the data that matters most to their health. With real-time data, conditions can be managed more proactively, deteriorations can be detected earlier, medication regimens can be optimised faster, all leading to improved outcomes and overall, a better prognosis and improved patient satisfaction. The combination of the two platforms truly puts the patient in the centre, connected with their care team, enabling them to order repeat prescriptions remotely, have medication delivered and access all their personal medical records. From the perspective of healthcare professionals, improved visibility on patients’ health status and trajectory means they can see the right patient at the right time, increase clinical capacity without overburdening the scarce resources, intervene early to reduce complications and be more preventative and impactful on the overall delivery of care. So everyone wins.

This is the future of healthcare. We want to tackle the biggest killers of our time - cancer, heart disease and Covid-19. We want to help people live longer, fuller lives. Our next chapter starts right now.

Sign up to our webinar on 23 February at 12.30pm GMT to hear more: https://info.huma.com/iplato-webinar