Ufonia

There were surgery cancellatio

Ufonia support the NHS with the backlog of surgery follow-ups

A new service to automate postsurgery review is helping in the task of clearing the backlog of clinical procedures that built up during the pandemic. The AI-powered tool developed by OXFO portfolio venture Ufonia is live at Buckinghamshire Hospital NHS Trust, helping manage the follow-up of patients who have undergone cataract surgery – the most common surgery in the world. This use of AI technology aims to improve healthcare systems worldwide by automating routine tasks and freeing staff to focus on delivering high-value care. This increases capacity for healthcare providers and front-line staff, as well as significantly reducing costs. A formal academic study of the system is due to commence in Oxford University Hospitals (OUH) and Imperial College in early 2021, and further clinical use cases are being developed with other hospital sites, including the use of the system to triage head and neck cancer care at St George’s Hospital in London, and the rolling out of a Covid-19 admin use case in Oxford University Hospital. Ufonia has raised a pre-seed round of £170k from Angel Investors including Mark Evans, Charlie Songhurst and Jean Nehme (introduced by the Foundry), grant funding of over £1.6 million from Innovate UK and NIHR among others, and their work is supported by SBRI Healthcare and Innovate UK's Sustainable Innovation Award. The Foundry supported Ufonia by providing 50 volunteers during the peak of the pandemic, four of whom are now full-time paid interns or staff members on a team of 12. Dr Nick de Pennington, Ufonia’s founder and CEO, explained that using already exceptionally busy, qualified staff to deliver the manual task of following up after surgery had led to burnout amongst healthcare professionals. This meant that expensive temporary workers were often brought in to fill the gap and, in some cases, patient follow-ups were missed altogether, risking serious conditions deteriorating, sometimes irreversibly. Following Covid-19, this has only got worse. “As the UK went into lockdown and more than 500,000 clinical procedures were cancelled, some of our long-term goals suddenly became short- or mid-term goals,’said Nick. ‘Through The Foundry we were able to connect with more people and access funding that would allow us to develop our product in a way that would help with Covid-19 recovery. ‘With their help, support and connections, we’ve been able to move fast, embrace the challenges, and to turn this crisis into an opportunity to grow and scale up while making what we hope is a real positive difference to many people.’

Dr Nick de Pennington, Founder, Ufonia