Innovation
Stimulating new models of care to help the most vulnerable population
About Bridgit Care
Powered by Artificial Intelligence and new accessible devices for the elderly, Bridgit empowers family carers to keep their loved ones well. Bridgit identifies the actions, services and products needed today, to keep our users well tomorrow.
The NHS Long Term plan set our preventative care delivery as one of its three key priorities. Using traditional approaches, preventative care needs more resources in the social and community care services to deliver.
This just isn’t possible. We already have a UK shortage of 120,000 social care resources to deliver existing services. So how can we deliver preventive care? With support from Microsoft and funding and guidance from SBRI Healthcare, Upstream Health are answering this question. Upstream
have developed a new type of home support solution called Bridgit, with the objective of empowering the UK’s army of 6.5 million family carers to deliver this preventative care.
Based at the Hull Integrated Care Centre and working closely with patients, family carers and clinicians, Upstream have developed and trialled a new accessible ‘home hub’ that captures key information from the patient and their home, and uses AI to monitor and track care needs, then
provide targeted support and direction to family carers.
This solution has the potential to deliver a £1.75 billion saving over five years, by supporting family carers to help their loved ones stay well and at home for longer and out of high cost services.
With Bridgit we can support the carer and the family members at the early stage of need and… give data to our service teams, to help prevent our patients from escalating. That’s why it’s key to our patient pathway here.
Eddie Niblitt, Service Development Manager, Hull
Impact
- Five jobs created/safeguarded
- Established market partnerships with Microsoft, Kainos, IQVIA, Allscripts and Bytes
- Secured $125,000 Microsoft funding for additional hardware development with Microsoft to be their first Azure Sphere powered health monitor
- Initiated deployment discussions with two local authorities, and one community trust
- Won the finals of 2020 EIT Health COVID response accelerator
- Named one of the top 100 healthcare technology companies for export by the DIT
- Involved in the Clinical Entrepreneurs programme
Bridgit demonstrates how start-ups like Upstream can quickly harness Microsoft technologies and solutions, and deliver a big social impact. Their unique use of accessible and low powered IoT devices, combined with Azure cognitive services is leading the way on what is possible.
Helena Zaum, Microsoft Industry Executive – Local and Regional Government