Public Funding for Minervation Limited

The National Elf Service is a series of health evidence websites, aimed at professionals. The aim of this project is to identify a sustainable revenue model for the National Elf Service. We have four websites that have been developed as pilots, e.g. www.thementalelf.net Four additional websites are currently under development and will be launched in April 2012, along with a new design that will group the 8 sites into an overarching brand: the National Elf Service. Our intention is to add additional health websites at the rate of 1 every 2 months, to have 12 at the end of 2012 and 30 by the end of 2015. A mobile application will be launched in April 2012 for the Mental Elf site, which users will be able to buy for their Android phone or iPhone. Our aim is to release mobile apps for the other health topics throughout 2012-13. The proposed project will use the currently free websites as a basis for market analysis in order to better understand the motivations for user take-up (by market segment), the most relevant routes to the market (with implications for the revenue model) and most importantly to help clarify the most appropriate revenue model to provide the National Elf Service on a long term sustainable basis. The websites highlight evidence based healthcare information for users in an easily accessible and digestible manner. The benefit to the user is that a mass of evidence based healthcare research is broken down into usable and user-friendly summaries for the target markets (e.g. psychiatrists, dentists, general practitioners). The benefit to society is a light touch individual solution to the heavy cost societal problem of the need for evidence based healthcare information rather than ignorance or biased or spurious or erroneous information. Our challenge is to identify the most appropriate revenue model that will sustain the National Elf Service without jeopardising the user take-up and hence the benefits. Resubmission – has the same or a similar application