Heim Health raises £2.2m to bring healthcare home
Heim Health, a software platform powering at-home healthcare, has announced a £2.2 million seed round to revive community-based healthcare through a tech-led, scalable model of delivery – easing pressure on hospitals and delivering better experiences for patients.
The round was led by Heal Capital and joined by Form Ventures, Portfolio Ventures and Houghton Street Ventures.
With 13% of NHS beds occupied by people who could be receiving care in the community, Heim Health’s mission is to help more patients be treated at home. They believe their ability to source and deploy nurses and then support their work with cutting-edge technology can unlock latent capacity, make home-based healthcare cost effective, reduce pressure on staff, and help more patients receive the care they need.
About Heim Health’s platform
Heim Health (formerly known as Ally Health) was founded by the team behind Testing For All – the UK's only not-for-profit Covid testing service to emerge during the pandemic, delivering more than 1 million at-home tests.
Testing For All founders Kelly Klifa and James Monico have teamed up with Sasha Tory, former Head of Partnerships at Qured, to launch the new venture.
Heim Health partners with healthcare organisations – both in the private sector and the NHS – to manage the end-to-end delivery of their at-home appointments. Heim sources highly-skilled nurses or other healthcare practitioners who can deliver care – such as blood tests, post-operative assessments, and injections – in a patient’s home, with the company’s API-led platform then enabling this care to be delivered in a resource-efficient and scalable way.
How it works
On behalf of their healthcare partners, the Heim Health platform sources the right healthcare practitioner for each clinical task based on qualifications, skills and geographical location. This means healthcare organisations can connect patients with mobile nurses on demand and at the click of a button.
The platform then uses ‘last mile’ delivery-inspired algorithms to optimise the practitioner’s route and schedule, reducing time spent on the road and enabling more patients to be seen within a shift. The Heim Health platform also makes sure any equipment needed for the appointment is delivered ahead of time. The founders believe this approach will unlock a major new source of healthcare capacity - revolutionising how much care can be delivered at home.
For patients, the tech offers a simple interface where they can book, change, or cancel at-home appointments – making it as easy as booking a table at a restaurant. Automated reminders and live updates keep patients up to date on their appointment, whilst referring clinicians can track the progress of appointments live in the Heim Health dashboard.
For older people, patients with mobility issues, or those with additional needs, the Heim Health solution removes the stress and obstacles often involved in accessing care, as well as relieving the burden on loved ones by simplifying the process of organising healthcare services.
For Heim Health’s healthcare partner clients, using the system to coordinate home health appointments has resulted in a reduction in patient waiting times of up to 85%. The ease of the system is also driving up patient engagement; 1 in 5 patients say that they wouldn’t have sought out support for their health needs if not for the on-demand, at-home offering.
Benefits for providers
The platform is already partnering with a wide range of primary health care providers, including Numan, Manual, Thriva, Ted’s Health, Nationwide Pathology, Optimale, Selph, and Bioniq, amongst others, to optimise their at-home care services, harness latent capacity, and reduce any unnecessary time spent in hospital.
This £2.2 million raise will enable Heim Health to further develop its proprietary assignment algorithms and support a wider range of healthcare services, including furthering its work with the NHS. They will also advance their mission of moving care from hospitals back into the community, with a focus on preoperative and discharge support pathways. This will help free-up hospital beds and reduce secondary care backlogs across the healthcare system.
Kelly Klifa, Co-Founder and CEO at Heim Health, comments: “For a long time, healthcare was rooted in the community. This brought so many benefits to both patients and practitioners, but in recent decades it’s become completely cost-ineffective to deliver it. Meanwhile, secondary care is becoming increasingly bottlenecked, with waiting lists at an all-time high and discharge delays keeping patients in hospital longer than they need. Our mission with Heim Health is to build the digital infrastructure needed to change this; revitalising community-based care and moving more healthcare from the hospital into the home through scalable modes of delivery.“
Sasha Tory, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer, adds: “Our goal is to make scheduling an appointment as simple for patients as booking a table or arranging a parcel delivery. We achieve this by enabling healthcare providers to deliver in-home care efficiently, eliminating the burden of unnecessary handwritten paperwork and logistics management. By relieving practitioners of these pressures, we tap into under-utilised workforce capacity and prevent future strain on the healthcare system.”
Marta Mrozowicz, Investment Manager at Heal Capital, comments: “At Heal Capital we’re big believers in bringing healthcare closer to home, which we think can lead to improved patient outcomes, increasing access to care, and easing the burden off traditional systems. What we’re really excited about is the real platform potential of Heim, which can easily leverage existing supply and match it with patient demand in a customer-centric fashion. The Heim team is doing the hard work of putting in the infrastructure for community care and we’re proud to back them on this journey.”
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