Awell Health has raised £1.9 million in funding to bring its collaboration and productivity tools to the healthcare industry.

Early stage venture capital investor LocalGlobe led the round, with involvement from Moonfire.

The investment will help the NHSX-approved supplier develop its software platform that enables healthcare organisations to create, implement and continually update care pathways.

The company was co-founded in 2018 by chief executive Thomas Vande Casteele and chief technology officer Yann Buydens. Vande Casteele is a serial entrepreneur and Buydens worked as a strategic consultant at McKinsey & Company. To date it works with approximately 25 hospitals across Europe.

“Technology has enabled teams in almost all industries to digitise and reinvent their workflow, but healthcare is still largely stuck in its old ways, using outdated traditional paper-based processes,” commented Vande Casteele. “As consumers, we are led to believe the industry has rapidly transformed - with news of innovations in robotic surgeries, new treatments, apps and wearables - but the way care delivery is organised has changed very little.”

The firm stated that COVID-19 has demonstrated the need for faster updating, as well as easier dissemination, of patient guidelines and care pathways as new insights come from understanding and treating the virus.

At the start of lockdown, Awell Health was able to launch a Coronavirus pathway based on international guidelines in a matter of days – and it has since been used by more than 50,000 people.

Thomas added: “Making existing care processes evolve to reflect the latest clinical insights continues to be an archaic, slow and cumbersome process - the reality is they should be updated much more frequently as clinical research is published which has been rising exponentially over recent years.”

Ingel Demedts, pulmonary physician and thoracic oncologist at AZ Delta/Ghent University, said: “Much more than just collecting outcomes, our digital transmural pathway from Awell has changed our entire care process for lung cancer patients.

"We have been able to integrate each patient’s point of view - both physical as well as psychosocial - on a systematic basis and increase the communication between patients, their GPs and the multidisciplinary hospital team," he continued, concluding: "It has allowed the implementation of value based health care in daily clinical practice, bringing our standard of care to a higher level from the very beginning of diagnosis and treatment until the end of life.”

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