NHS digital triaging app eConsult closes £7 million funding round

February 9, 2021 | by

Closing out last week was eConsult’s announcement of a new £7 million round of financing. The triage app is currently used by about 40 percent of NHS practices–3,200 NHS GP practices across the UK. The funding, on top of a £5 million Series A raise last October (Crunchbase, AngelNews) was via Gresham House Ventures (this raise and the Series A lead) and Calculus Capital, plus existing investors.

The fresh funding will boost eConsult capabilities for primary and secondary care, plus expansion into urgent care with an Urgent and Emergency Care tool, eTriage, and outpatient triage tool, eSpecialist. They are also developing a triaging service for Emergency Departments (EDs). 

eConsult was formed in 2013 by four NHS GPs. It uses a bank of over 10,000 questions from a number of clinical sources to direct patients to the most appropriate care, assign priority, and direct to a GP surgery. Their research indicates that 70 percent of GP enquiries can be closed without a F2F consult. 

Last August, eConsult, Q doctor, and Cognitant Group jointly created a toolbar that combined eConsult with Q doctor’s video consult technology and Cognitant Group’s ‘Healthinote’ verified patient information service. They later added HCI’s medical video library service. In June, eConsult added the Ministry of Defence; 183,500 service members and dependents in 124 international locations are able to access online consultations with Defence Primary Healthcare (release).

eConsult’s service volume exploded during the early pandemic and has held its leading share versus competitive services such as Babylon Health, Push Doctor, Infermedica, and Livi (Kry). Babylon has had its challenges in the UK market but is aggressively moving into enterprise accounts in the US and Canada, quietly raising just before Christmas $100 million (£74.5m) in a convertible loan led by VNV Global. Mobihealthnews. UKTechNews

Doing more for less in primary care – DHACA’s Wednesday webinars on 22 and 29 April

April 20, 2020 | by

DHACA restarts our webinar series after Easter Week with a panel of three contrasting suppliers of GP process improvement (aka “total triage”) software and the NHS England expert on the topic, at 10am on Wednesday. In our first Webinar, huge potential benefits were identified from use of this software, which is particularly well suited to the requirement of the current pandemic that face:face consultations be avoided where possible.

However the benefits don’t stop there. Patients, clinicians and practice managers all benefit hugely…and I can speak from personal experience as my local surgery converted recently and has never looked back! We’ll be exploring these benefits in more detail the following Wednesday 29th April in the following webinar when users – both professionals and patients – describe their experiences of the software, and the challenges implementing it.

For more information and to book for this week’s webinar go here and for next week’s (29 April) go here.

We have more exciting webinars coming up, including self-testing to reduce face:face GP consultations further so keep an eye on DHACA’s Webinar listing for when they are published.