European healthcare platform accuRx has closed a GBP27.5 million Series B funding round to transform communication across healthcare systems worldwide.
The financing round was led by Lakestar with participation from British Patient Capital, Latitude VS (sister fund to London-based seed investor LocalGlobe), Atomico, Trusted Insight and Encore Capital. The newly raised funds will facilitate the growth of the accuRx team, enhancing its offering to GP practices and building products that will enable expansion into secondary care.
Communications amongst those involved in a patient’s care is often fragmented and felt by patients in almost every health system across the globe. Addressing a growing USD8.3 trillion global healthcare industry, accuRx offers the first collaborative communications platform that brings patients and their healthcare teams together, a crucial step in integrating care. accuRx’s software is currently used by 98% of GP practices in England and a growing number of hospitals and community trusts to communicate with their patients and one another.
Throughout the pandemic, accuRx played a significant role in supporting frontline healthcare staff, receiving a world-class user satisfaction score of 88. accuRx introduced a video interface which facilitated remote consultations and surveys to allow remote monitoring of patients with COVID-19 symptoms. Additional features include asynchronous messaging and two million patients are now contacted via accuRx weekly. Most significantly, accuRx built a vaccine booking system in just 4 weeks that has now been used to manage over 21 million COVID-19 vaccinations – over a quarter of all vaccines delivered in England.
Dr David Triska, GP Partner at Witley and Milford Surgeries, says: “accuRx’s product has reinvigorated communication with our patients, enabling a better relationship between GPs and patients, which has ultimately led to better care provision. Our patients now have the confidence that they’re getting speedy and accurate responses from our team, and the use of regular Florey questionnaires to gather more information from our patients has been transformative for clinical record keeping and the care we provide.
We’re thrilled that accuRx has received funding which will enable it to expand its primary care product set, some of which we’re trialling at the moment. We’re also excited about accuRx’s progress into secondary care as better interaction between primary and secondary care is a huge step forward for safer and more effective patient care.”
accuRx, which was founded at Entrepreneur First, is now focused on building products that will deliver more value to its GP users, and delivering software that will better connect them with the rest of the healthcare system. It’s developing system-wide infrastructure that allows for NHS communication outside of GP systems such as accuRx Web, which currently has 11,000 weekly active users in non-GP settings including hospitals, pharmacies and care homes. The latest funding will accelerate the company’s progress towards becoming the unifying communications platform that brings patients and their healthcare teams together.
“We believe that healthcare is a communication industry and when healthcare teams can communicate easily and reliably, they can deliver even better patient care. We’re proud to have become a critical piece of infrastructure for general practice in the UK, and they’ve used us to message over 60 per cent of the population. We’ve got an exciting roadmap to grow our adoption in settings like hospitals and district nursing, to connect communication across the health and care system.” says Jacob Haddad, CEO and co-founder of accuRx.
“We place a huge emphasis on user research, having spent the early part of building accuRx shadowing healthcare staff in a surgery in Oxford. Working closely with our users enables us to learn how we can build powerful and intuitive software for them to communicate with each other and their patients. This latest round of funding is testament to the phenomenal work that the team have done so far and the opportunity that lies ahead,” Jacob adds.
“We’ve spent the last 18 months delivering work to support our users throughout the pandemic, including remote consultations and building a booking system for the national Covid-19 vaccination programme. We’ve grown the team from less than 50 people to over 110 accuFolk over the last year and the funding enables us to hire more people to support our vision. We’re building products fast and at scale, which are incredibly reliable and user-focused and we’re excited to grow our engineering team to help us support more of the healthcare community,” says Laurence Bargery, CTO and co-founder of accuRx.
“An overhaul of communications in the healthcare industry is long overdue. Inefficient communication between nurses, doctors, general practitioners, to name a few, is tremendously detrimental to patients. We see this issue in healthcare sectors around the world and the pandemic has only heightened the need for action. We’re proud of what accuRx has been able to accomplish so far in transforming communication within primary care and we can’t wait to see the great benefits its tools will afford secondary care as well. With its product suite, accuRx has the potential to become a crucial backbone and infrastructure of healthcare markets globally,” says Oliver Heimes, Partner at Lakestar.
