Public Funding for Connected Health Systems Ltd

Prescribed medicines are the most common intervention in healthcare; in the UK, it is the second highest area of NHS spending, after staff costs (PSNC, 2021). Digital transformation and innovation have become commonplace in health and care, backed by government policy and funding, through initiatives such as Virtual Wards, Digitising Social Care, Healthy Ageing Challenge, among others. However, medicines are an essential but currently absent part of this digitisation. For example, remote patient monitoring platforms position themselves as 'complete' platforms to manage patients remotely, integrating with over 100+ third-party devices -- medicines data, however, is not included. Falls prevention is another growing space using data as as a predictive tool -- here too, medicines data, is not included despite medicines being a leading indicator for falls. Other such examples exist in the care planning space, long-term condition management, and specialist care e.g. cancer. This gap has arisen because currently these platforms do not have the right data available in a format that they can easily use and draw insights from and are, therefore, reliant on patients manually inputting their information about their medicines -- data, which is often missing, incomplete or inaccurate, reducing its usefulness. Working in a collaborative approach, this demand-led industrial research project will design, develop, and test a novel, game-changing interoperable medicines insights pipeline and data solution to address this unmet market need -- delivering unprecedented insights/intelligence that can be used to pre-empt medicines-related issues _specific to the patient_. **In a truly scalable manner, it will allow rich and contextualised medicines insights to be provided for any patient in the UK with an NHS number, opening up a huge market opportunity.** This project will place medicines at the heart of the ongoing digital transformation of health and care, closing the loop between carers, clinicians, and their patients.

The UK (and global) issue of medication non-adherence -- people not taking their prescribed medicines -- poses a major challenge to health and social care, leading to poor health outcomes, medicines wastage, and a strain on already burdened health and social care systems. 50% of medicines prescribed for long-term health conditions are not taken as intended (NHS, 2018).An acknowledged approach to combatting non-adherence is Medicines Optimisation (MO) -- where individualised data on the impact of medication is known, so people receive the right medicines, at the right time. This includes empowering and enabling people to self-care -- more easily report side-effects and move to medicines that _work_ _for them_. Currently, there is no workable MO focused service model in social care. This project aims to address this. Our 16-month project is business-led by technology specialists Connected Health Systems Ltd (CHS) and demand-led by Oxfordshire County Council (OCC) to meet the under-provision of an MO service within health and social care. CHS will use their proven technology -- an assistive technology used at home which identifies _if, when and what_ quantity of medicines have been taken. This information goes into an intelligent platform, LOOP, which provides data on adherence to the service user's carer. This system has been designed to be accessible by vulnerable populations in urban and rural areas. This project combines this technology with OCC's Reablement Service to create a new model of self-care. Reablement supports service users to live independently. However, to ensure adherence they currently conduct daily face-to-face medication visits to older people's homes, limiting a service user's ability to self-care. The proposed project will reduce these through remote monitoring of medicines adherence, enabling targeted face-to-face, rather than routine, visits from Reablement. To get this right, person-centred design is key. 40-50 service users will be actively part of iterating (adapting) the design of this new model by using versions of the service and feeding back to our Oxford AHSN evaluation partners on how effectively it allows them to self-manage their medicines and communicate back to Reablement about e.g., medicine side effects or other reasons that might impact on taking their medicines. All this new knowledge will be fed into the new service model design, leading to the development of a new service model of care, co-designed and delivered in Oxfordshire with the aim of scaling-up and rolling out across the UK.

The global issue of medication non-adherence poses a major challenge to health and social care, leading to poor patient outcomes, medicines wastage, and a strain on already burdened health and social care systems. A rapidly ageing population, and the rising incidence of co-morbidities, complex medication regimes, and associated issues, heightens the risk and severity of medication non-adherence, and highlights the need to provide more proactive, coordinated, and continuous care. Connected Health Systems' (CONNECT) specialist expertise and disruptive technology represents a solution to this significant multi-dimensional challenge, providing a new way to manage and understand medicines - with a key aim of driving better patient outcomes. Building on CONNECT's existing best-in-class connected device, our novel interoperable platform will enable carers and clinicians to provide better and more frequent care through accessible and actionable insights, powered by real data not guesswork. In doing so, CONNECT unlocks the power of real-time medication data to transform care pathways, complementing the increasing digitisation and automation of health and social care, in line with the goals of healthy ageing and self-management of care. Led by a team with prior first-hand real-world experience and proven track record building pioneering businesses together at the intersection of digital health, social care, and pharmacy, CONNECT is an agile and diverse company. Combining technology with our deep expertise in pharmacy and elderly care, we design and develop solutions that address the needs of the patients and carers we work with on a daily basis.