Doctaly Assist explains how pivoting in a pandemic clinched them the ‘Outstanding Resilience in a Challenging Time’ award at the UKBAA Angel Investment Awards
The UKBAA Angel Investment Awards 2021 took place on 8th June, recognising the outstanding achievements of early stage investors and the businesses they back. One of the new awards for this year was ‘Outstanding Resilience in a Challenging Time’, which celebrated a person or organisation who has demonstrated their capacity to achieve successful growth and resilience to overcome the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The winner was Doctaly Assist, a market-leading Remote Patient Monitoring platform that provides services to NHS patients across the country. We recently sat down with Phil Tyler, Chief Operations Officer at Doctaly Assist, to discuss their win, look back on the last 12 months and to find out what their plans are over the next year.
Doctaly Assist’s original ambition was to create a private healthcare marketplace in the UK and the business was gaining traction until the pandemic hit. With fast-rising numbers of COVID patients being admitted to hospitals, the NHS had to take over private hospitals meaning that Doctaly Assist experienced supply side shock and had to pivot. Phil explains:
“We could either hunker down and try and ride it out, which given how long this has been going on for would have been a disaster, or to look for other options. We knew that there were huge additional pressures as a result of the pandemic and that also created opportunity.”
After regrouping and speaking with their contacts and networks, Doctaly Assist identified a way that they could reconfigure their technology platform to help Primary Care. Clinicians were spending an average of 25 minutes on the phone to patients as they followed a standard triage procedure. Doctaly Assist’s platform, built with support and guidance from leading clinicians and researchers at Clinical Effectiveness Southwark, King’s College London, King’s Health Partners, Imperial College London and South East London CCG, reduced that time to around four-and-a-half minutes through their unique chatbot functionality that triages patients via WhatsApp through a series of messages, collecting the information a clinician needs to carry out a consultation. Expanding further on how the platform works, Phil shares:
“It’ll help us significantly from a business development perspective. Plus, it’s been a really good morale booster for the team.”
“Once you finish answering your assessment, the platform puts you into a risk category. There are certain points in the flow where if you answer in a specific way, it will tell you to call 999. Patients then drop into a ‘virtual ward’ where clinicians can log in, and starting with the high-risk patients, assign them and take ownership over them. Then they seamlessly pick up the conversation with the patient over WhatsApp.”
Using their platform, Doctaly Assist helped clinicians handle just under 90% of assessments through chat only. A library of pre-written responses also makes it easier for clinicians to respond quickly and provide information such as breathing exercises and a safety net of things to do if a patient’s symptoms worsen. There is also a pathway via phone for those patients who do not use WhatsApp, who are mainly elderly, to use the platform so as not to exclude anyone from benefitting from it.
A challenge that Doctaly Assist faced was getting pulse oximeters, a device that clips onto your finger to measure how fast your heart is beating and how well you are breathing, into the hands of patients that needed them. Working with the various boroughs they were operating in, Doctaly Assist helped to organise delivery services resulting in 200-300 devices being delivered per day during the pandemic’s peak.
With the remaining restrictions due to be lifted in the UK on 19th July, there’s increasing concern about the backlog that has built up for the NHS and how that’s going to be tackled. There’s also speculation over how disruptive flu and other respiratory viruses might be during the winter given the lack of socialising people have been able to do due to the pandemic. Is there any opportunity there for Doctaly Assist?
“Absolutely. Most people’s COVID illness, if managed at home, will get better. 95% of cases are like that but you also need to give people the advice as to what happens if they are unfortunate enough to be in the 5%. The platform is perfectly suited for that. It lets you know which of your patients have got worrying symptoms. It’s ideally suited to deal with large populations with a safe but minimal amount of clinical time.”
Doctaly Assist’s hard work paid off when they won the ‘Outstanding Resilience in a Challenging Time’ award at the UKBAA Angel Investment Awards. How did they feel about winning?
“It’s very useful. We’re a newcomer into the remote patient monitoring space and that kind of visibility helps with spreading the word about what we are doing. We have some points of differentiation such as the fact that we are completely app-less and the way we set up our workflow is subtly different. It’ll help us significantly from a business development perspective. Plus, it’s been a really good morale booster for the team.”
With a recent expansion into India and a partnership with insurance giant AXA that expands the platform into Thailand, Doctaly Assist has plenty of irons in the fire over the coming 12 months.
“We’ve got quite a comprehensive roadmap. A big piece of the work we’re doing is getting the information we’re collecting back into the patient’s record held at their GP, as seamlessly as possible. At the moment it requires a bit of an administration overhead at the practice so we’re working on direct integration. We’re also looking into wearables and how we can integrate with wearable diagnostic equipment. That opens up a whole range of conditions that you can monitor. We’re talking to the US as well because this is a global problem, no question. We’ve already made some inroads into Asia but we’d also like to go west, and look at some opportunities in the US.”
Find out more about Doctaly Assist at https://doctalyassist.com.
View the winners of the UKBAA Angel Investment Awards 2021 at http://awards.ukbaa.org.uk.
