Innovation
Ufonia
Competition
Competition 19 - NHS Reset and Recovery and New Ways of Working
Clinical Need
An ageing population and increased expectation are putting increasing demand on healthcare services. Staff can face burnout and need to deliver high-volume workloads, driving increasing costs for providers. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the demand and capacity mismatch due to the widespread cancellation of elective care creating a backlog of clinical work.
The Innovation
Dora is an automated telephone voice assistant that can conduct a natural language conversation with patients. Dora is delivered to patients by a regular telephone call and no high technology is needed for the patient to use the system.
Preliminary work suggests Dora is able to reduce the clinical burden on staff by reducing the number of patients who require follow up with a clinician. It allows clinicians to be redeployed to higher value activities in the care pathway, where their skills, insight and empathy can be best utilised.
In addition, where the service has been implemented, providing follow up over the telephone reduced the risk of COVID-19 transmission from face-toface reviews, and freed up hospital space which was at a premium due to social distancing measures and lack of capacity for increasing patient demand.
Traction
- CE marked and UKCA marked
- Best in class FHIR integration
- Initial study presented at conference internationally and won Best Poster award at UKISCRS and ACSRS (Washington DC)
- NIHR AI Trial shortly to be peer review
published - Partnered with the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare and working on maximising Ufonia’s
impact on the triple bottom line to meet Net Zero targets - The product is accessible in the UK as well as globally - scaling with inbound demand into North America, and with interest in adoption from hospitals across Europe and Asia
Since we have had patient feedback we’ve realised that Dora is delivering the standard of care that we think is appropriate for our patients. It was fantastic when we came into contact with Ufonia. I cannot see how we will be able to look after these patients without innovations such as this.
Miss Sarah Maling, Consultant Ophthalmologist, Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust
NHS Impact
- Rolling out across 13 NHS Trusts in the UK to automate clinical conversations ranging from end to end cataract, to long-Covid calls.
"Every time I choose Dora because it seemed not to be a waste of time. [It is a] wholly unnecessary exercise to get up and get in the car, aim to be at the hospital at a certain time, find a parking space and all that goes with all that… Dora seems an ideal way as I can see it, of eliminating the vast majority of calls which will be from people saying "yes I'm fine, I've got no side effects."
Cataract patient
Date Published
March 2023