HealthTech start-up, Doccla, has secured £2.4m in investment to develop its pioneering virtual ward technology to ease pressure on hospitals.
In an oversubscribed seed round led by Giant Ventures and early-stage technology VC, Speedinvest; Doccla is reimagining hospital care using innovative remote medical monitoring to deliver safe, effective services from the home.
And this latest investment will supercharge the start-up’s ambition to make virtual hospitals a core part of modern healthcare.
Founded by health entrepreneur, Martin Ratz; and tech entrepreneur, Dag Larsson, Doccla harnesses innovative Internet of Things (IoT) technology to monitor patient’s vital signs and deliver valuable insights to clinicians.
This helps hospitals alleviate the pressure on resources, enabling the early discharge of patients while remaining under the care of clinicians.
Doccla’s virtual wards have already saved thousands of bed days for the NHS and achieved a 29% reduction in emergency admissions and a 20% reduction in A&E attendance.
The NHS now faces a challenging winter season and we’re evolving our technology to support care providers, giving them the extra clinical capacity and making it easy for hospitals to open up virtual wards
The cashflow-positive start-up will use the new funds to invest further in its technology, including predictive analytics tools and integrations with the latest medical wearables and journal record systems, as well as expanding clinical capacity to support NHS trusts’ staffing rotas, particularly out of hours.
Doccla also plans to expand into new European markets.
Doccla’s development was propelled by the pandemic as it scaled virtual wards in minimal time to serve overwhelmed hospitals as well as recovering COVID patients and chronic respiratory and heart patients.
It now provides remote patient monitoring services across several NHS trusts, offering a unique end-to-end service and reporting one of the highest patient compliance rates in the industry, exceeding 95%, even among older and multi-morbid patients.
Larsson said: “Our end-to-end virtual ward services are extremely easy for the care provider to take on and extremely hard for them to ignore.
“The NHS now faces a challenging winter season and we’re evolving our technology to support care providers, giving them the extra clinical capacity and making it easy for hospitals to open up virtual wards.”
Cameron McLain, managing partner and co-founder from Giant Ventures, added: “We are inspired by Doccla's mission to deliver world-class care outside the four walls of a hospital.
It provides a vital solution for a strained healthcare system, delivering a product that improves the patient experience and tackles cost.
“Doccla has the potential to transform the traditional healthcare industry and we are thrilled to be supporting Martin, Dag, and the team on this exciting journey."
