A Chat with Jonathan Abraham, CEO at AI Powered HealthCare Company: Healum

Healum is an award winning care planning system and patient management software. It provides healthcare professionals with a suite of patient facing services designed to improve health outcomes and access to care for people living with long-term conditions.

Through Healum’s cloud based, interoperable app patients can access their personalised care plan. It displays the services, support, and links to healthcare professionals they need to make the best choices, and live long, happy, and healthy lives.

Care plans can be accessed on a mobile device or printed out and are available in multiple languages. This means that more people can access the tools they need to understand and manage their health, irrespective of the ethnic, socioeconomic, or cultural background.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
For Anuj and me, the founding story behind Healum is personal. Anuj sadly lost his father to cancer in 2012 and was inspired to make a difference in healthcare following his loss. I was exposed to the pressures that ill-health can place on people and their families through my mother’s work in the British Red Cross.

With more than 40 years’ experience in the technology space, Anuj and I joined forces to build Healum, united by our understanding that digital health solutions can be used to make people’s lives better.

Long-term conditions are the single biggest burden on healthcare services, occupying 50% of GP appointments and two thirds of inpatient stays. Life expectancy of the poorest people in England is 20 years shorter than the wealthiest. With a system that sadly exacerbates health inequality like this, we felt it imperative to use digital health to close this gap.

We were also aware that personal health information was scattered throughout the system, and health advice varied between healthcare professionals. That is why we wanted to create something that would make sense of this data and put it to good use.

Drawing on my experience commercialising disruptive technologies at Google and Anuj’s extensive knowledge of AI and product design, we built Healum.
 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 
The pandemic increased the awareness and importance of digital health products like ours for remote health management.

Prior to the pandemic, we were involved in a project called You & Type 2, where we created an app to help people living with type 2 diabetes to manage their condition in between clinical check-ups. During the pandemic, this work became even more important as it allowed individuals to manage their type 2 diabetes when they were unable to seen by their GP due to pandemic restrictions.
 

What can we hope to see from Healum in the future?

 
The pandemic has repositioned digital health as a necessity. Having recently won the DigiLeaders Impact Award for Health Tech and been named by Brown Rudnick as health tech’s most fundable company, we are excited for Healum’s future.

In April we are launching our live learning network with the National Institute of Health research (NIHR), The Greater Manchester Clinical Network, Vernova CIC and Oxford University. Using 15 years of primary care data from patients, we are training our AI algorithms in a way that combats algorithmic bias and health inequalities.

The data we collect will form the largest, most diverse data set of its kind which will be shared via a dashboard with GPs to identify the best clinical and non-clinical interventions for individual patients and will support clinicians to deliver high quality, personalised care.