Meet Issa Dasu Patel, CEO and Co-Founder at Digital Health Startup: CONNECTCare

CONNECTCare is helping solve the missing link in digital health and social care: medicine management. For people taking multiple medicines, it is very easy to miss doses or make mistakes with timings. This can have significant ramifications – such as health complications or an increased likelihood of falls, particularly for older people.

At CONNECTCare, we’re working to empower people to manage their medicines safely and independently from the comfort of their own home, through access to remote medicines support and insights.

We’re building tech to help ‘digitise the brain of a pharmacist’ by bringing together prescription data, which is currently held separately by different health teams, and making it available to patients and those who care for them through a single, centralised platform. We have also created a ‘smart medicines box’ to further support safe medicine management.

This sends audiovisual notifications or SMS messages to patients to remind them to take their medication. Carers and elected family members can also be alerted if doses are repeatedly missed, and given detailed reports on how the person is interacting with their medication over time. Together, our software and connected devices are helping transform the delivery of remote medicines support and ensure patients are able to manage their conditions independently for as long as possible.
 
 

 

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

 
My family works in pharmacy, so I’ve always been familiar with the importance of nuanced, community-based medicines support. While working as a digital and data advisor on the UK’s first national remote monitoring programme during the pandemic, I realised this support was completely missing from digital and remote care delivery.

So, together with my brother, Mehfuz, I decided to start CONNECTCare to address and help solve this issue. We set out to empower people to manage their own medication remotely by preserving the vital role of community pharmacy within digital care delivery.
 

 

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

 
We’re a very young company, having launched in late 2021. However, we’ve already seen a significant amount of growth. We’ve received a total £2 million in funding to date, including grant funding from Innovate UK.

We’ve also launched several projects in partnership with NHS Trusts and local councils, including a Healthy Ageing Initiative with Oxfordshire County Council, where we’re supporting older people to manage complex prescriptions at home and stay out of hospital. This project, alongside others, is helping form a blueprint for better, safer remote medicines support which can be scaled to help patients and those who care for them across the UK.
 

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

 
We are so excited to continue developing these solutions even further in 2023, building on our existing partnerships and collaborating with an increasing number of organisations nationwide. Our aim is to bridge the current gap between medicines support and remote care, and ensure those with complex needs are not left behind.

We’re excited to see the results of our Healthy Ageing Initiative in Oxfordshire over the coming months and begin scaling this support to reach people up and down the country. There are also a number of other exciting projects on the horizon, through which we hope to expand our support to meet a growing range of patient circumstances and needs – watch this space!