CONNECT Care secures £500,000 funding to develop its technology

Preston-based CONNECT Care has been awarded £500,000 to further develop its technology which helps patients better manage their medicines in their own homes.

The funding package has been supplied by Innovate UK and is part of a £25m scheme to back cutting-edge innovations that are significantly ahead of others in their field.

CONNECT Care's technology features a dashboard that brings together patients, carers and clinicians. It enables patients to develop more independence in taking their medications, while giving carers and clinicians information about the patient’s medications use and sending alerts to carers if anything is amiss.

The company states that medication non-adherence is a major challenge for the health and care system, with up to half of medicines prescribed for long-term health conditions not taken as intended, costing the NHS more than £500m every year.

The Innovate UK funding will help the Preston company create a ‘novel data insights engine’ that will generate predictive insights and notifications with more context for carers.

Issa Dasu Patel, co-founder and CEO, said: "Innovate UK gives funding to innovations that are significantly ahead in their field and we are glad to have been recognised as such. We have already integrated medicines data in a unique way, and we want to use that vast drug-specific knowledge to create richer insights.

"All our team has worked in pharmacy, digital health or social care for a number of years and one thing we realised is that managing medicines is a real challenge in the community.

"Once the doctor has written the prescription for the patient there’s very little support. The Innovate UK project will help change that. It will bring together social care commissioners, carers, pharmacists, hospitals, GPs and innovation leads – it’s one of the largest medicines collaborations we’ve ever seen in Lancashire."

The Innovation Agency, the Academic Health Science Network for the North West Coast, helped CONNECT Care make the funding application and supported it in running a pilot for its existing technology in Lancashire.

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