Public-Purpose Technology Intelligence
Summary
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- Founded in 2016
- Total Funding: £9.6 million
- Latest Funding: Series A, £8.8 million
- Revenue band: £1-5 million
- Lead investors: Atomico, Innovate UK (grant), LocalGlobe, Entrepreneur First.
- Office: London, UK (HQ).
- FTEs: 10-50
- Key clients/partners: NHS, General Practices, Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), Primary Care Networks (PCNs), Hospital Trusts
- Key execs: Jacob Haddad, CEO and co-founder: M.Eng Engineering Economics and Management, University of Oxford; MSc Health Policy, Imperial College London; Laurence Bargery, CTO and co-founder: BA and MSci Natural Sciences, Cambridge University; previous experience at Goldman Sachs and Spiral Software Ltd.
Profile
Health communication in the UK has been described as stuck in the dark ages. With the NHS only planning to phase out pagers by 2021, it is hard to argue with the claim. AccuRx is intervening in this space to modernize communication within medical teams and between health professionals and patients. For example, between doctors and patients, it offers Message Patient, which allows medical practitioners to send patients text messages. Healthcare professionals in primary and secondary care can communicate using accuMail.
AccuRx’s initial offering, Message Patient (fka Chain SMS) was timely when launched in 2018 as it keyed into a UK health communications modernization wave. However, the biggest catalyst to accuRx’s growth has been the coronavirus crisis. It has enabled accuRx to expand its offerings and onboard new clients at a dizzying pace. AccuRx could exploit this opportunity because of an agile approach to product development. Once the virus hit, GPs pushed for expanded online functionality. One of accuRx’s responses was to, over one weekend, integrate video consultation (based on video conferencing app Whereby) into its Message Patient product. The following Monday, it released the feature to almost 50 percent of UK practices, who were already using Message Patient. In two weeks about 75 percent were using it for over 35,000 daily consultations.
Plans
- In December, accuRx launched a COVID-19 vaccination booking service, accuBook.
- In January, it is launching accuRx plus, a set of paid tools which are either new features or features developed in response to the coronavirus pandemic. They include: online patient triage, video consultations, batch messaging, expanded SMS options and COVID-19 screening surveys.
- accuRx has told us it also plans to increase hospital uptake for its products.
Who Should Speak To This Company
GPs, CCGs, PCNs, GP Federations and Super-Partnerships, and Hospital Trusts
Company In Action
Patient Triage is accuRx’s tool to enable online consultations for non-urgent care. When a patient clicks the triage link, they are taken to a landing page that ascertains the nature of the patient’s request. A patient who submits a medical query will have to fill in details about their medical issue, including attaching pictures and noting how soon they would like a response. Being able to assess the urgency of a request helps the practice prioritize responses. The request appears as a task to be assigned on the relevant practice staff’s accuRx dashboard. They can save the query to the patient’s medical record, assign the task to another member of the practice, and, among other options, email or text the patient.
StateUp View
AccuRx’s offerings so far have been low-tech, something that seems to be a trend in health communications. For example, Doctolib and Practo offer similar services in Europe and India respectively. However, simple interventions like text messaging are fungible. Product differentiation for fungible services is difficult to achieve; pricing and brand recognition are typically the means to an edge in this context.
We think accuRx is doing a good job on both fronts. AccuRx’s strategy has involved building a customer base with free products, and then adding in paid extra features that can be purchased separately, but are cheaper bundled and purchased at scale. AccuRx prefers to deal with CCGs, who will ostensibly make bulk purchases. Pricing for paid features is attractive. At the time of writing, for Message Patient, it charges 1.5p per message fragment; a practice with a list size of 10,000 can expect to pay £120 to £180 annually. CCGs can buy the accuRx plus bundle for 49p per patient. Reviews on social media and practice review platforms suggest AccuRx has a healthy reputation undergirded by its agile management, extensive user research and responsiveness to clients.
AccuRx has recently introduced more complex features, such as Patient Triage. Its founders have backgrounds in health and technology. They initially founded accuRx to provide data-driven decision support that mitigates overprescription of antibiotics. A move to more differentiable, high-technology features long term is imaginable.
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