Health tech firm expands reach across the globe

A company which helps communicate important information to children undergoing medical treatment has seen its technology installed in hospitals around the world.

The Xploro system was launched in 2020 by Preston-based entrepreneur Dom Raban following his own experiences with his daughter who was undergoing cancer treatment.

He developed the technology after realising that the doctors often directed their information to parents, sidelining the children who were receiving often scary and painful treatment.

Drawing on his background as a designer running digital and creative agencies, he began developing the tablet-based system to provide children with age-appropriate information relevant to their conditions and treatments.

With support from the Department for International Trade, adoption of Xploro has grown beyond UK hospitals into Spain, Singapore and the USA including the prestigious Boston Children’s Hospital.

One of the main obstacles to international growth had been the translation required for the product to be suitable for overseas users. International trade adviser Jenny Mooney worked with Dom to access the Internationalisation Fund, a co-investment grant scheme initiated and sustained by the DIT and supported by the European Regional Development Fund. It provided a match-funded grant of £9,000 to cover US English and Latin American Spanish translation costs.

These translations also enabled Xploro to get support from KidsX, an American paediatric care accelerator that brings together top children’s hospitals and digital health companies to build, test and deploy software solutions to improve paediatric care.

Dom said: "Collaboration with KidsX will enable us to get accepted more quickly and widely in the US. We built the software to be easily localised into different languages. The more it grows, the more effective the system will become as we build the information platform to include more treatments. "

Xploro, which began life with Dom as the sole employee, now employs a team of ten which will grow to 25 by the end of the year. Healthcare UK, the healthcare arm of DIT, has listed the company in the top 100 healthcare start-ups for export

Dom added: "Support from the DIT has been crucial to gain broader international acceptance of Xploro. We will continue to use their expertise and wide-ranging international network of contacts to expand the business.

"Our long-term vision is building a system for any patient, with any condition, anywhere in the world. We will continue to develop the system for worldwide use and continue to take advantage of the support and know-how of the international business experts at the DIT."