COVID-19 is arguably the greatest challenge faced by the NHS in its history. Intensive care units (ICUs) are being placed under immense pressure as the virus continues to spread at a relentless pace. New ICU infrastructure is being built; however, the logistics of intensive care provision has yet to be addressed from a workforce perspective. With qualified healthcare providers in high demand and short supply, ensuring that medical expertise is available across the country is challenging. How can the NHS rapidly leverage its clinical resources to meet the growing need? The solution is the Proximie ICU platform. The Proximie ICU system builds on the success of the original Proximie platform, which is a secure and clinically robust solution already deployed in NHS hospitals to connect surgeons remotely during live procedures. Proximie's experienced agile development team will design and build the ICU solution in a three-week period and will work with existing hospital partners to support set-up and develop recommended clinical workflows. The system will be a secure, lightweight platform that can be rapidly deployed in any ICU environment to enable clinicians to compound their expertise and provide advice for multiple patients from a single command centre. The beauty of the solution lies in its extreme simplicity. A laptop, tablet or smartphone and camera are placed at the patient bedside to provide a live video feed. A healthcare professional will be able to instantly alert clinicians that they require support via the click of a button or direct message. A clinician, working remotely or self-isolating at home, can access the Proximie ICU system via the Chrome browser on a laptop and immediately view multiple patient video streams on a dashboard. This information can then be used to provide real-time advice to healthcare professionals at the patient bedside, resulting in timely, and higher quality, patient care. Moreover, the system reduces PPE requirements and the potential spread of infection by decreasing the number of individuals physically present in a clinical area and reducing the time delay associated with having to don PPE. Proximie has received requests from multiple UK and US hospitals to rapidly build and deploy the solution. The platform will be designed with collaborative input from the NHS and the ICU team at Guys and St Thomas' Hospital. This is a responsive, high impact project that will reduce costs and help save lives.

Proximie will develop an innovative and easy to deploy remote real time AR collaboration and assessment platform for use during bowel cancer screening colonoscopies. The Proximie system will use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI and ML) to assess polyps found during colonoscopies. Use of the system will significantly reduce NHS costs, whilst improving patient experience and patient outcomes. It will enable earlier detection and diagnosis of bowel cancers and significantly improve use of staff time resources.

Proximie believes there are substantial opportunities to improve the productivity and workflows associated with the delivery of surgery and surgical consultation. Our highly centralised healthcare system has created a problem/inefficiencies, surgical delivery in district locations is often inefficient due to the lack of access to surgical expertise at specific time and locations. Patients are often held up within the NHS on wards or being transferred to specialists centres often simply due to the lack of meaningful five minute consultation between two colleagues. Skype and Facetime have enhanced general communication, Proximie believe that ICT technologies (augmented reality & cloud computing) can provide an unprecedented level of collaboration in the theatre to remove logistical and scheduling bottlenecks associated with critical clinical staff. Proximie is driven by a number of innovative surgeons and IT professionals that wish to implement a novel combination of AR and mixed reality smartglasses (e.g. Microsoft’s HoloLens) to provide fully immersive remote collaboration between to users to drastically enhance surgical delivery, consultation and teaching. The enclosed application provides Proximie with a vital opportunity to resolve their AR related development challenges.