| Company name: | HEAL.med CIC | Contact name & Job Title | Lee Paxman-Clarke, Co-Founder & Director |
| Project title: | Deapp – Diabetes Education for Children | Month/year | May 2023 |
| Style of case study: | Written | Account Manager | Jo Maltby |
| Case study owner/ writer/producer | Sam Burbage | Third party assigned? |
| The background to the case study / Storyboarding |
| HEAL.med CIC (Health Education and Learning) is a not-for-profit Community Interest Company set up to deliver knowledge and education to support children and young people with type 1 diabetes.
HEAL.med aims to ensure every child diagnosed with type 1 diabetes has access to high quality and effective education through a social enterprise. This is delivered as Deapp, pronounced “Deep”, the Diabetes Education Application. The co-founders are NHS consultant endocrinologist Dr James Greening who provides clinical expertise, NHS diabetes educator and researcher Sarah Lockwood-Lee who delivers education, support and development, and De Montfort University designer and researcher Lee Paxman-Clarke who provides design/technical support plus day-to-day business management. |
| The challenge / trigger event / the service, product or project in question |
| Deapp is aimed at diabetes education. Current models use approaches that often encounter barriers to effective education around numeracy, literacy, and ethnicity. The market opportunity is that their program mandates self-learning within a quality assured program delivering objective outcomes.
This reduces staff time to train patients, provides better knowledge and understanding of diabetes and has quantifiable health economic benefits over and above current models. Deapp is digitised and quality assured and the resources are branded, copyrighted and inclusive, with multiple language translations available. However, Deapp identified a large market for its technology internationally, and wanted to scale up their operations. |
| The solution |
| Through the SoLSTICE project, HEAL.med met with an Innovation Advisor, who worked with them to identify the best way to expand internationally. It was found that HEAL.med were eligible for a Specialist Networking Grant (SNG) as part of the project support offered, which would allow the company to travel to various international conferences and fully ascertain the size of the international opportunity available to them, and plan for expansion.
The Innovation Advisor worked with HEAL.med to find the best international events for them to attend. After researching, the Friends for Life (FFL) USA Diabetes Conference was identified as an ideal opportunity for HEAL.med to showcase their app and educational resources to the US market. FFL Describes itself as: “A dedicated group of world-renowned faculty, adults, children, and families with diabetes—including siblings and children of adults with type 1 diabetes—for a weekend of education and support. |
| The results / evaluation |
| Attendance at FFL was a critically important step in HEAL.med’s business strategy for future growth and sustainability. Their intention was to gauge the US market and understand the different needs and requirements of the patients and care system in order to allow HEAL.med to develop their innovative app. This also enabled them to ensure that their app and training tools are relevant to specific global requirements.
HEAL.med also learnt all about current innovations within diabetes treatment. This helped them to adapt and develop their diabetes educational app and remain current with innovations within the field. This, along with the opportunity to showcase their flagship product, has provided HEAL.med with growth opportunities that would have been otherwise unattainable. To date, HEAL.med’s app is used by children/young people and their parents in 67 UK specialist pediatric diabetes centres. Over 2500 patients have been trained, there have been 25,000 downloads of the HEAL.med app and there are over 800 current active patients. HEAL.med have identified 125 additional UK sites with projected start-up revenue of £500,000 based on a full uptake. HEAL.med is working on valuable resources for the diabetes community available from 2022 to create additional income streams. Internationalisation of their education is still in a research and viability stage, but there is significant interest coming from all over the world. They are aiming for further roll-out in 2023/2024. The team has just kicked off a project with a hospital in Australia and is now actively engaging with the international market. |
| Medilink Midlands’s role/Quote from the company |
| “Remaining up-to-date and gold standard is essential to maintain relevance in the market. By supporting us to attend the Friends for Life Conference in the USA, Medilink Midlands and the SoLSTICE project allowed us to ensure that we remain at the forefront of diabetes education. This, coupled with our future international expansion plans, means that we are in a far better position than we would have otherwise been, to expand internationally and deliver diabetes education across the world.” Lee Paxman-Clarke, Co-founder and Director |
| Medilink Midlands’s role/Quote from the Advisor | |
| “As Innovation Advisors, we want to help companies grow in any and every way possible. We are committed to a vibrant, varied, and global life science community with roots in the Midlands. Companies such as HEAL.med are the embodiment of this, and the SoLSTICE support they have received will help them to realise their growth ambitions, expand internationally and provide diabetes education across the world.” Jo Maltby, Innovation Advisor. | |