The Dublin-based start-up’s flagship product is a affected person care and communication platform referred to as Portasana that’s utilized by scientific groups throughout Eire and the UK.
It has been an excellent week for Sonia Neary and her digital well being start-up Wellola. Driving on a wave of demand for healthcare providers basically – and those who cut back hospital overcrowding specifically – the corporate raised €2.2m in funding final week.
Neary based Wellola in 2016 with an outlined purpose: to make the way forward for healthcare extra preventative, community-based and digital.
Since then, the corporate has been making regular progress in purchasers throughout the UK and Eire with hospitals underneath each the NHS (Nationwide Well being Service) and HSE (Well being Service Govt) utilizing its platforms that make the lives of clinicians and sufferers simpler.
From physiotherapist to entrepreneur
A chartered physiotherapist by background, Neary had labored in scientific apply for 15 years previous to founding her personal firm. Whereas in her position, she was capable of achieve distinctive insights into the wants of sufferers and practitioners in at the moment’s digital age.
“I educated at each Trinity School Dublin and DIT (now a part of TU Dublin) and have lived and labored within the US and Asia at completely different factors in my profession. I developed my industrial and operational expertise by way of entrepreneurship programmes supported or run largely by Enterprise Eire,” she says. “I grew to become a giant believer in leveraging digital know-how to assist hospital-at-home and self-management care fashions.”
Wellola’s key providing is a affected person care and communication platform referred to as Portasana that’s utilized by private and non-private hospitals in each Eire and throughout the UK, together with Leeds, Birmingham and London. In reality, final week’s funding led by Elkstone is poised to assist the start-up additional broaden out there.
“Portasana provides complete capabilities, starting from real-time well being knowledge monitoring to personalised schooling about particular circumstances, enabling knowledgeable decision-making in healthcare administration,” Neary explains.
“The place Wellola goes a step additional is that our platform totally integrates with core scientific techniques within the hospital setting; sufferers can effectively monitor their well being parameters and have interaction with healthcare professionals with out necessitating frequent in-person visits, thereby optimising their healthcare journey and minimising pointless disruptions.”
Giving scientific groups their hours again
Neary mentioned that Portasana may be built-in with core NHS techniques and affected person data. Hospital workers also can curate an “limitless” quantity of evidence-based digital care pathways for his or her sufferers throughout all providers, decreasing the necessity for follow-up appointments.
“The great thing about the product is it’s fast to arrange, low-code, hardware-light and helps sufferers to self-manage, solely presenting for face-to-face care the place completely essential, decreasing prices and returning time to take care of scientific websites,” she goes on.
“Of notice, Wellola has a library of pre-curated content material that scientific websites can avail of as they require – for instance, a library of programs and movies to deal with inhabitants well being considerations akin to smoking cessation, administration of diabetes and COPD – or websites can curate their very own.”
The purpose, in keeping with Neary, is to assist as many sufferers to self-manage their care and provides again as many hours to scientific groups as is “as is humanly potential”, providing healthcare organisations value financial savings at scale. And issues have been going properly to that finish.
“Demand for healthcare providers has by no means been increased and we’re listening to from our prospects that tackling the elective backlog to release capability for extra sufferers is a high precedence. The best way Wellola digitises administrative duties and scientific pathways permits healthcare organisations to just do this,” she says.
“Our group is made up of 21 individuals for the time being and our latest funding means we are able to broaden on this quantity, with the goal to rent extra individuals throughout our technical and operational groups within the subsequent 12 months.”
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