Healthtech-1, a UK-based startup developing tech to automate admin in GP practices around the country, has raised a $3.5m seed round.
The round was led by London-based VC Moonfire, and also featured accelerator Y Combinator — which Healthtech-1 participated in last year — alongside a number of angels.
It comes as a rising number of healthtechs are looking to help tackle staff shortages across healthcare systems in the face of growing — and ageing — populations by automating tasks, both in clinical and admin settings.
Healthtech-1’s first product, which automates new patient registrations, is currently deployed in 10% of GP practices in England, says co-founder Raj Kohli, who launched the company with ex-Monzo engineer Peter Huang. By the end of 2025, it’s targeting more than 90%.
What problem is Healthtech-1 solving?
Currently, new patients register themselves at a GP by filling out either an online or paper form with around 18 data points, which is then manually inputted into the practice’s operating system.
“It’s a broken and difficult process which is full of mistakes and manual error,” Kohli says.
Using proprietary algorithms, Healthtech-1’s product conducts identity checks against NHS records, writes the data into the system and flags areas to the practice where they might need to pay special attention, such as around safeguarding.
“If a child tries to register with an uncle [named as their guardian] instead of a parent, that’s a safeguarding alert that the GP practice needs to be aware of and take action, just in case of trafficking or something along those lines,” Kohli tells Sifted.
On average, a GP practice will register 71 patients a month, he says — but adds that that figure can rise to up to 1,000 in cities. The startup estimates that it can save practices around 15 minutes of receptionists’ time per registration.
That works out at a cost of £3.75 per registration if a receptionist is paid £15 an hour, Kohli says. Healthtech-1 charges £2 per registration and Kohli tells Sifted the startup has automated over 500k patient registrations.
The startup also launched its second product in February this year, automating the filing of lab results in GP practices — a task which is typically done by doctors themselves. It’s currently live in 31 practices and costs 20p per lab result automated.
Doing “deeply unsexy” work
Those two tasks are just a fraction of more than 70 admin tasks that GP practices have to do, says Kohli. Healthtech-1 mapped these out at the cofounder’s parents’ GP practice in East London — where the startup is also based.
While automating admin in healthcare could be big business, it’s startups working on automating clinical tasks that have raised some of the biggest rounds in the space. Denmark’s Corti and France’s Nabla, which both automate note taking for clinical conversations between doctors and patients, raised $60m and $24m respectively in the past year.
“Loads of companies are trying to automate the GP or the doctor — and maybe they’ll be successful — but when you work inside a GP practice you see that the clinical conversation isn’t what needs to be automated, that’s the stuff that GPs are quite good at,” says Kohli.
What needs to be automated are the processes that support that conversation, he tells Sifted — but a lot of businesses have overlooked that “deeply unsexy” work.
Founded in 2021, Healthtech-1 will look to double its headcount of 15 by the end of 2024 as it scales its patient registration tool and its lab results automation product — which it hopes to have in 50% of the more than 6,000 GP practices in England by the end of 2025.
Kohli doesn’t think the startup will need extra funding to get to that point — but further down the line he sees potential for Healthtech-1 to automate communication between GPs and care homes and hospitals.
But for now, Healthtech-1 is focused solely on GP practices, he says: “When 90% of patient contact happens in primary care, that’s how you impact this country.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/healthtech-1-raise-monzo-alumni-news/
