Two decades of working as a physiotherapist in hospitals and in the community led Sonia Neary spotting an opportunity for digital transformation in patient care.

Initially she developed an idea to solve a problem she had been having as a travelling physio, a way to manage patient records on the move and to digitally schedule appointments and receive payments. But as time went on, she understood the pain points she was feeling were being experienced across the healthcare industry. 

Healthcare is generally seen as a digital laggard rather than a leader in delivering services to its users – even the practice of using the postal system to manage patients and appointments leads to cost and time inefficiencies, as appointments are missed. So, the market is wide open for transformation. 

Over the past six years Neary and her co-founder Dr Greg Martin, who has previously worked with the World Health Organisation and the HSE, developed Wellola.

A secure portal which enables secure video consultations between medical professionals and patients, it allows for real-time scheduling for in-person and online care and enables at-home monitoring of patients that may otherwise have been confined to hospital. 

The software can be plugged into a hospital or GP system and has both a clinician and a patient facing interface, giving patients full visibility of their care and access to their own information. 

The company also gives providers the tools to provide a more “equitable, rounded care-package” when reaching marginalised groups. The Dublin Simon Community, Helplink and Accord are all currently working with Wellola. 

So far the start-up, which is based out of the Guinness Enterprise Centre in Dublin, has received €1 million in backing, but that will likely be the extent of its raising. To avoid further dilution of the cap table, Neary is now planning for the business to now be funded entirely through sales.

The company’s projected revenue is €2 million for this year, and all going to plan, that will rise to €25 million within 5 years. 

Wellola’s technology is currently in use in 170 nursing homes and more than 2,500 general practitioners have access to it. It also counts the VHI, the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, and Nutricia as customers. 

It recently won two contracts with the NHS, worth a combined €1 million to the company and opening its portal to a potential two million patients.

While the procurement process in the UK allows Wellola a crack at being chosen for these large-scale valuable partnerships, she said the process in Ireland is more cumbersome, and the technology is still in the piloting stages with the HSE. 

“It’s very daunting. It’s a David and Goliath situation,” Neary told The Currency in this week’s podcast. 

“They are gigantic organisations. The NHS is one of the largest employers in Europe, it has a massive footprint and massive staff. So it is daunting, and the sales cycles can be long, but it’s worth it.”

There are efforts being made to leapfrog the digital transformation of Irish healthcare forward, through the “stay left, shift left” mission to support patients with the best quality of life and care in the most cost-efficient format, which promoted through the HSE’s Digital transformation segment, but right now we are still trailing the UK.

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“Technology exists in every other industry and for some reason, healthcare is just miles behind.”

Wellola operates from the principle that once a patient is stable, they don’t need to be within the boundaries of a hospital.

Neary gives the example of a someone undergoing hip replacement. Once the patient is stable they should be able to leave the hospital, and can be monitored from home – by taking photos of any wound, tracking symptoms, completing online assessments and sending that information back to the healthcare provider. 

“It offloads what’s already a really overwhelmed healthcare system. Ultimately we’re living longer with chronic conditions and there is a finite number of talented health care professionals and there is a finite facility to care for people in the hospital settings,” she said.

“So this is where we’re saying, we’ve got to help people to care for themselves.

“Hospital beds are not suitable for most of us, unless you’re acutely unwell and really need to be in a facility. People are isolated socially. They’re not involved in their activities of daily living, they’re lying in hospital beds, not mobilising so they’re deteriorating, and then they’re exposed to things like MRSA or Covid. So it’s just not the right place for many of us.” 

Patient management

The other side of the Wellola business is patient management systems. An estimated £1 billion is lost by the NHS each year because of missed appointments and £120 million is spent on sending letter by post, areas which are ripe for implementing cost-efficiencies.

The consumer end of the Wellola app allows patients to manage their appointments, such as cancelling or rescheduling quickly. Using this portal, hospitals would no longer need to send out letters notifying patients of appointment times, or receipts or results and the communication process could be entirely digitised. 

“If you give people really simple tools, like how to manage their appointment, they can turn up, or they could do a video consultation instead and that keeps them on the care pathway, rather than missing appointments and waiting months extra,” Neary said.

“Technology exists in every other industry and for some reason, healthcare is just miles behind in deploying technology to deliver that kind of care model.”

Wellola is currently working on a project with researchers in Trinity College Dublin to identify its next market move and to gather intel which countries have attractive legislative frameworks and telematic infrastructures. In the short term that will mean an expansion into Germany, but ultimately the company is aiming to be Europe’s “most accessible patient portal.”

The Irish start-up isn’t the first, or the biggest of these kind of platforms on the market, but it is designed to be is the most comprehensive. 

“Many of the solutions on the market are sort of point solutions. So they might do messaging, they might do video consultation, they might do symptom tracking, what we do is we have a modularized platform,” Neary said.

“So buyers can switch between modules, without having to go back to another supplier, with another set of risks, another set of procurement, which is a really big body of work and costly for an organisation.

“We’re designed to sit around what they have, and to be there as their needs grow.”

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