From Little Acorns Do Mighty Oaks Grow ... Go Collaborate With a University and Change the World

The collaboration between CM2000, the DHI and Edinburgh Napier University, and enabled by Interface Online, provides one of the best examples of how a collaboration between a great SME and a university team works to breakthroughs for citizen-focused health and social care:

Why? Because CM2000, the DHI, and the team at Edinburgh Napier are passionate about changing the provision of care and using data to drive this. Here's more details (provided by Interface Online):

Established in 1999, Care Monitoring 2000 (CM2000) have developed a mobile platform that enables health professionals to be identified in a Service User’s home ensuring the right care is delivered at the right time. 

Their technology has been designed so that both Service Users and Care Workers are completely protected; sending alerts, for example, when a visit is running late so that action can be taken.

It evidences a range of Service User improvements, tracks the impact of interventions and helps assess customer satisfaction levels. Linking to CM2000’s Family Portal module allows Service Users and their families to monitor the care and gives them opportunities to answer questionnaires that can be communicated back to the Care Provider, Local Authority and NHS.

Challenge

CM2000 record around 10 million community care visit logs each month, and also collect a great deal of data on the needs of Service Users. They approached Interface looking at how this data could be used to evaluate the long-term health of an individual, further supporting those administering the care, as well as those receiving it.

According to Brian Brown, CM2000’s Director of Scotland,

“We approached Interface because they have an excellent reputation for linking business and academia.”

Solution

Interface worked with CM2000 to develop their brief, sending it to the most relevant universities and research institutions in Scotland. They received a number of notes of interest but decided to work with Professor Bill Buchanan, Professor of Computing, & Adrian Smales, PhD Researcher at the Institute for Informatics & Digital Innovation at Edinburgh Napier University.

Thanks to support from Professor Buchanan & Adrian Smales, CM2000 secured a ￡5,000 SFC Innovation Voucher, administered by Interface. This extra funding helped to offset the cost of the project allowing them to process large amounts of data which gave them the ability to assess the likelihood of the onset of illness. This enabled at-risk clients to be easily identified and closely monitored, thus reducing the need for medical interventions.

Follow On

CM2000 were so pleased with their initial project with Edinburgh Napier University that they wished to continue the relationship, and in collaboration with Professor Buchanan and Adrian Smales, developed a second project focussed on building a more robust evaluation platform. Their overall aim was to gather additional information on patients’ conditions, in line with NHS and Local Council requirements, developing predictive techniques which will help identify those at risk. In doing so CM2000’s technology would be able to pre-empt expensive hospital based care, helping health care providers across the world to save millions of pounds and improve the quality of service to vulnerable Service Users.

The detailed research and development work in both stages was undertaken by Adrian Smales, a Research Fellow at Edinburgh Napier University, and whose research work has been focusing on the detection of frailty using data from a range of sources. Adrian said:

“We have a long-term vision of using data to detect the early signs of illness, and apply new methods that should lead to improved care and better outcomes for all”

Due to the nature of the project, and to cover the cost of the research team who were needed to develop the state-of-the-art predictive tools, CM2000 once more approached Interface to apply for SFC Follow on Innovation Voucher funding. The Follow on Innovation Voucher allows companies to apply for up to ￡20,000 of funding which has to be matched with cash from the company. Thanks to support from Professor Buchanan they were again successful and received almost ￡20,000 of funding which allowed them to progress with the project.

According to Professor Buchanan,

“Currently, patient information can only be effectively captured in controlled environments such as hospitals, care homes or a GP surgery. This project has significantly extended the effectiveness of CM2000’s mobile platform and by applying our research into advanced predictive analytic techniques we have successfully incorporated patient focused data capture with real-time personalised feedback.”

Brian Brown, CM2000’s Director of Scotland adds

“By working with the University the time to market has been reduced. The development of this new technology has huge commercial benefits and we expect to significantly increase revenue. It also strengthens our export potential. We expect both quality and cost savings benefits for our customers."

Since working with Edinburgh Napier University, CM2000 have gone on to work with the Digital Health and Care Institute (DHI). The objective of this project was to apply advanced predictive analytical techniques to the data captured during homecare visits in East Dunbartonshire in order to identify markers which are indicative of the early onset of illness. Leveraging expertise from ongoing work in Primary Care in England will accelerate the integration of the CM2000 mobile application into the Frailty Framework in Scotland, providing a unique opportunity to mine data across the boundary between health and social care. 

This collaboration has already been hailed a success in the East Dunbartonshire Health and Social Care Partnership Care Inspectorate Report, where it scored 6 or excellent in the 'quality of care and support' category. The report from the July 2016 Care Inspectorate told us:

"The people involved in the project were extremely positive about its benefits. These included being more knowledgeable and aware about their activity, fitness and heart rate, and more informed about their general wellbeing."

This is an example of how big data, machine learning and predictive analytics can be used in healthcare, and the collaboration between Edinburgh Napier University, the DHI and CM2000 is an example of great Scottish knowledge exchange between commercial and academic partners.

The Digital Health Institute offers a fusion of health, design, technology and business knowledge from the network of its partners that span health and care providers, third and private sectors, higher education and business development agencies. This partnership offers a strong supply of diverse innovation opportunities that can flow and iterate through its innovative business model ‘explore’, ‘experience’ and ‘exploit’ an agile model.

For more information on CM2000 please visit www.cm2000.co.uk

Please note that Interface administers the Innovation Voucher Scheme on behalf of the Scottish Funding Council. All funding applications are reviewed on a case by case basis by the Scottish Funding Council, guidelines can be found here.