Our Investment in accuRx: bringing patients and their healthcare teams together
Londoners Jacob Haddad and Laurence Bargery grew up proud of the NHS, their country’s world-class healthcare system. After they met as part of cohort 6 in Entrepreneur First in London, they realised through their interactions with GP practices that there was a lot they could do to help bring healthcare communication into the 21st century. Despite game-changing advances in medicine over the past 50 years, the way GP practices communicate with their patients hasn’t changed. They vowed to find a solution.
Communication in health care has only become more challenging, as care today is delivered by teams rather than individuals, across multiple sites, and with increasing amounts of data to handle. Yet a lack of built-for-purpose communication tools forces healthcare professionals to use snail mail, faxes, pagers, email and WhatsApp to reach patients. That results in hours of wasted time and crossed wires, increased staff burnout from high workloads, and less time for complex patient care coordination especially when multiple teams are involved.
With accuRx, Jacob, Laurence, and their team are building a unifying communications platform that brings patients and their healthcare teams together, helping make patients healthier and caregivers happier.
At Atomico, we want to support founders who are using technology to rewire the world in favour of something better for as many people as possible, which is why we are proud to partner with accuRx.
Right now, accuRx is scaling their first flagship product, Chain SMS, into more NHS GP practices, in keeping with the company’s commitment to building technology that helps NHS deliver efficient, accessible and high-quality care.
Chain SMS lets GP practices send text messages to patients, asking them to book important tests, sending key follow-up information after an appointment, and letting them know when a prescription is ready to collect. The service is fully integrated with the current IT systems used in the majority of practices, and each message takes less less than 30 seconds to send. Even less if doctors use one of the pre-loaded templates.
As proof that the NHS is excellent at adopting technology designed with the service in mind and that helps staff do their jobs, Chain SMS has already been taken up by 20% of GP practices in England, from close to zero when it was launched in February 2018. To date, staff have sent 2M messages to 1.5M patients and are currently sending a message every 2 seconds.
We’re excited to welcome accuRx to the Atomico family.
