Alison Meadows, co-Founder at Priority Digital Health: Using Tech to Integrate Healthcare Across The UK

Priority Digital Health is a digital-first innovator with a proven track record in online community and lifestyle services, digital social prescribing, and diabetes education booking services. With a focus on disease prevention and health promotion, we’re changing the way patients access lifestyle and wellbeing services online.

The leading-edge proprietary Priority Platform, which underpins our service offering, is a fully interoperable system connecting all patient records in the UK.

Customised for health and social care providers, the Priority Platform is designed for a superior service user experience in online self-referral and bookings for appointments, empowering positive self-management of health and wellbeing, as well as effective case management and outcome reporting for providers.

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

 John Dibb and I both have a background in providing customer-centric digital products and services for NHS, Public Health, and private sector clients. We saw an opportunity to take a whole-system approach to help streamline, connect and integrate existing services and processes so we joint-founded Priority Digital Health. My background is in behavioural science, so that experience of knowing how to drive behaviour change very much complements John’s background of technology in healthcare.

The digital world has the potential to transform health but only if people are persuaded to take control over their health and that is where I can add value to the business. Ultimately, we are all about prioritising service users, time, and resources to achieve better outcomes while alleviating demand pressures across the sector.

How has the need for Priority Digital Health evolved during the pandemic?

Like many organisations, 2020 has been an extraordinary year for Priority Digital Health. With March came the onset of Covid-19, which presented a very real challenge for us – to quickly adapt and scale up the Priority Platform to support communities in a time of need.

In response to the crisis, we developed and launched the Essex Welfare Service in the space of a week– a platform that enabled healthcare professionals to match vulnerable people to suitable volunteers. The platform has since been enhanced to support all residents with the practical, emotional, healthy lifestyle and social care support they need through the Essex Wellbeing Service. The platform is also now available to be customised for similar services and can be mobilised within 72 hours.

Meanwhile, our team has also been busy helping public sector organisations take their health and wellbeing services online – diabetes education, lifestyle services, and social prescribing, for example – to reflect the nature of our increasingly socially distanced world.

What can we hope to see from Priority Digital Health in the future?

2020 has been busy and exciting for us. We recently scooped two awards at the prestigious Health Tech Digital Awards 2020. We won the ‘Best COVID-19 Solution for Community Care’ award for our ‘Covid-19 Welfare Platform’ and ‘Best Solution to manage Chronic Disease’ award for our ground-breaking Diabetes Education Booking Platform.

Earlier this month we became a listed supplier for the G-Cloud 12 framework, a coveted procurement catalogue managed by the Crown Commercial Service (CCS). This year we also became a partner for the esteemed Medical Interoperability Gateway, alongside achieving both ISO 27001 accreditation and NHS DCB 0129 compliance with ETHOS Consulting. Now, more than ever with Covid-19 still very much a feature in peoples’ lives, we’re determined to drive more improved, efficient, and cost-saving systems for the NHS, public health, and workplaces whilst keeping patient experience at the forefront of our work.