Medwise AI wins Innovate UK Smart grant
Funding will expand clinical search engine into secondary care
UK startup, Medwise AI, has been awarded a £311,000 Innovate UK Smart Grant to expand its artificial intelligence-powered clinical question-answering search platform into secondary care settings.
The 18-month project kicked off this month and will drive the evolution of the Medwise platform to support the healthcare workforce in acute medicine, enable NHSx Digital Technology Assessment Criteria certification, and review the technology within an academic research study.
Medwise is partnering with 8fold governance on DTAC and will work together with Ysbyty Gwynedd, part of Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, on a time-motion study to generate clinical evidence of the benefits of the search platform.
Founded in 2019, Medwise.ai is a Cambridge-based digital health company on a mission to empower healthcare professionals to do their best work and provide better care to patients.
Its highly-customisable search platform – based on AI and natural language processing technology – assists healthcare professionals in getting accurate clinical information at the point of care, searching a wide range of trusted national and local medical sources to help healthcare professionals get trusted and reliable answers to clinical questions.
The COVID pandemic has increased pressure on the NHS and clinicians and, with clinical guidelines changing frequently, it is not possible for healthcare professionals to assess all the available medical literature.
Receiving the grant from Innovate UK is a huge endorsement for us, recognising the importance of an innovation that takes care of the overstretched clinical workforce and improves the lives of patients at the same time
But, using Medwise’s search platform, clinicians save 2.6 minutes on average per consultation, allowing them to focus on providing the best patient care.
An Innovate UK-funded pilot focused on COVID-related clinician searches estimated that Medwise could save the NHS in England £20m.
In response to demand from clinicians, the platform is now expanding into additional specialty areas, such as acute medicine.
Commenting on the achievement, Dr Keith Tsui, co-founder of Medwise, said: “Receiving the grant from Innovate UK is a huge endorsement for us, recognising the importance of an innovation that takes care of the overstretched clinical workforce and improves the lives of patients at the same time.”
Dr Chris Subbe, a consultant physician in acute medicine and clinical senior lecturer at Bangor University, added: "With the increasing speed at which knowledge generates new guidelines, doctors are fighting to keep up to date.
“The project with Medwise offers a potentially dramatically-different way to access knowledge that matters right at the bedside.
“Having life-saving information available at the bedside when it matters most is an amazing prospect.”
