News, moves and M&A roundup: Appello acquires RedAssure, Shaw departs NHS Digital, NHS App goes biometric, GP at Hand in Manchester, Verita Singapore’s three startup buys, Novant Health and Tyto Care partner

October 17, 2019 | by

Appello telecare acquires RedAssure Independent Living from Worthing Homes. A 20-year provider of telecare services to about 700 homes in the Worthing area in West Sussex, the acquisition by Appello closed on 1 October. Previously, Appello provided monitoring services for RedAssure since 2010. Terms were not disclosed. Release.

Another NHS Digital departure is Rob Shaw, deputy CEO. He will be leaving to pursue a consulting career advising foreign governments on national health and care infrastructure. He is credited with moving the NHS Spine in-house and establishing NHS Digital’s cybersecurity function. The Digital Health article times it for around Christmas. Mr. Shaw’s departure follows other high-profile executives this year such as former chief digital officer Juliet Bauer who controversially moved to Kry/LIVI after penning a glowing article about them [TTA 24 Jan], Will Smart, Matthew Swindells, and Richard Corbridge.

One initiative that NHS Digital has lately implemented is passwordless, biometric facial or fingerprint-based log in for the NHS App, based on the FIDO (Fast-Identity Online) UAF (Universal Authentication Framework) protocol (whew!). NHS Digital’s most recent related announcement is the release of two pieces of code under open-source that will allow developers to include biometric verification for log in into their products.

Babylon Health’s GP at Hand plans Manchester expansion. The formal notification will likely be this month to commissioners of plans to open a Manchester clinic as a center for GP at Hand’s primarily virtual consults. This follows on their recent expansion into Birmingham via Hammersmith and Fulham CCG which will be notified. How it will work is that patients registering in Manchester would be added initially to a single patient list for GP at Hand located at Hammersmith and Fulham CCG. Babylon is now totalling 60,000 patients through GP at Hand.  GP Online

Singapore’s Verita Healthcare Group has acquired three digital health startups. The two from Singapore are nBuddy and CelliHealth, in addition to Germany’s Hanako. Verita has operations in Singapore, the US, Asia-Pacific and Europe, with 35 alliance partnerships with medical clinics and hospitals across Australia, Southeast Asia and Europe. Mobihealthnews APAC

Novant Health, a 640-location health system in North Carolina, is introducing Tyto Care’s TytoHome integrated telehealth diagnostic and consult device as part of its network service. Webpage, release

NHS App’s pilot results: renewing prescriptions good, making appointments…not so much

April 11, 2019 | by

The NHS App, announced at the end of 2017, piloted in September-December 2018. It started with one GP practice in Liverpool and grew to 34 practices across England, eventually growing to 3,200 registered patients, exceeding its target registration group by over 1,200. The NHS report was issued on 8 April.

  • Most used the app to view their patient records. Unless the patient had given prior consent to their GP to view their full patient record, only a summary was available through the app. This will revert to full patient records with the ability to add to the record as the default by April 2020.
  • For the pilot users, they reported positively on the app for prescription renewals; it was used for 662 repeat prescriptions and was found by 87 percent to be ‘easy and convenient’ as well as the app’s ‘most useful service’.
  • On booking appointments, the feedback was not so positive. Users had difficulty understanding the jargon used in booking.
  • They also found the two-factor authentication for security purposes annoying. For the full implementation, the development team is planning to add a biometric log in.

The NHS hopes to roll out the app to all English GP practices by July 2019. While the app became available in December on Google Play and the Apple App Store, patients have to wait for their GP to connect to it. Mobihealthnews, NHS report site

A counterpoint to this is the final closing of the Microsoft HealthVault later this year. Users will have until 20 November to migrate their data. HealthVault was one of the first services to allow consumers to record and share electronic health data. Microsoft has already shut down two related services, HealthVault Insights and the Health Dashboard. Most of these storage services have shut down (Revolution Health, Google Health, Google Fit, Dossia) with the surviving Apple Health Records and GetReal’s Lydia. Mobihealthnews