HEAL.med’s NHS-Backed App Makes Chronic Disease Education Memorable
Co-founders Sarah Lockwood-Lee, James Greening, and Lee Paxman-Clarke are creating structured education programs to help users learn about their health conditions at their own pace. Their app, featuring animations and videos, is putting the fun back into learning how to manage complicated health conditions and will improve long-term health outcomes.
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The Challenge
Imagine being a student in a classroom where the teacher drones on and on, reading from a textbook, while you struggle to stay awake, let alone retain any information. Now, imagine that instead of a classroom, you’re in a hospital room. You’re diagnosed with a new health condition and are being bombarded with complex medical jargon on what’s happening inside your body and its management.
Unfortunately, this is the reality for many patients, especially young patients and their parents. The traditional approach to education isn’t fun and often fails to resonate with patients, making the educational experience less engaging and effective and leading to frustration on both sides.
Just like those boring school lessons we’ve all endured, the monotonous educational sessions in hospitals fail to capture patients' attention and interest. The difference is that when it comes to patient education, the stakes can be extremely high, sometimes meaning the difference between life and death. That’s where HEAL.med comes in.
Origin Story
The idea for HEAL.med emerged from a simple conversation over coffee between Sarah Lockwood-Lee, an educator at the children’s hospital in Leicester, and James Greening, a children’s diabetes consultant at the Leicester Royal Infirmary. Frustrated with traditional patient education methods that often felt uninspiring and ineffective, they joked about creating an app that would make it easier for patients, especially children, to learn how to manage their health conditions.
However, the duo knew that simply digitizing existing educational content wouldn’t be enough. So, they delved deeper into the concept of flipped learning, where learning happens through resources like videos, animations, and interactive materials that patients can explore at their own pace. This is followed by sessions with healthcare professionals to assess understanding and address gaps in knowledge.
To bring their vision to life, Sarah and James sought assistance from DeMontfort University’s Design Unit and joined hands with Lee Paxman-Clarke, a member of the university’s design and research team.
Together, the trio started seeking funding to make the project fruitful. After several pitches, they landed an investment from the Health Foundation, which was then matched by Sanofi. With the funds in hand, they requested the university to be involved in their mission. A green flag from the university, and they had a group of healthcare professionals, including consultants, dieticians, psychologists, and educators, helping them write the core content.
At this point, Sarah and James observed an interesting pattern: for topics where a consultant would want 20 pages, a nurse would probably want 10 pages, but an educator would say they only needed five lines. This is when they further realized the need for bite-sized information that was more attainable for patients. So, they started going through the content again and turning clinical terms into something super simple, easy, and fun.
With his background in product design, innovation, academia, and university lecturing, Lee and his team helped Sarah and James put all the complicated medical information into a medium that was colorful, engaging, and suitable for all ages.
The trio decided to use local artists to create the visuals and worked with students, children with diabetes, and even nurses, doctors, and healthcare professionals to do the voiceovers for the videos. This was for two reasons. First, they had to get the resources made as best and cheaply as possible within their budget. Second, they wanted to ensure the content resonated with its target audience and fostered a sense of ownership among users.
“We've asked a lot of the patients and the parents about their understanding of what they wanted from the app. And I think one of the biggest things is that we use their voices. At the end of the day, people want to listen to an app that's been designed by and is being promoted by people living with that condition, because that makes it okay to be preaching that this is the education you need, and this is what you've got to do. It's the patients telling the patients about the education on the app if that makes sense,” says Lee.
Despite the initial challenges, Sarah, James, Lee, and their small team with a huge network persevered. Half a year ago, they formed HEAL.med as a not-for-profit Community Interest Company (CIC). Over time, they have expanded their reach beyond the East Midlands, training over a thousand healthcare professionals and piloting its program in multiple hospitals across the UK.
Recently, they have had the chance to expand to Australia, but since their app is designed for the NHS in the UK, using local UK accents, colloquial terms, and terminology, their next challenge is to adapt their materials to meet the diverse needs of patients worldwide.
“We're saying things completely different from what an Australian might say. We might be using different units of measurement and different terminology, and they might have different access to different equipment. They might even be teaching about diabetes completely differently, just in general. The same applies to the US as well. We've been to the US for the Friends for Life Children with Diabetes conference and spoken to people there. They want to hear local American voices; they want to hear themselves represented in that diabetes education. Having just a random voice explaining something, there's a disconnect to having a local person in Florida, or even different accents across the US, talking about their experience with Type 1 diabetes and explaining what it is. There's more impact, there's more and more sense of belonging in that,” says Lee.
So, HEAL.med is currently embarking on international collaborations, including partnerships in Australia and the United States. Through research pilots and translation efforts, they’re aiming to adapt their materials to meet the diverse needs of patients worldwide, acknowledging that effective education must consider factors such as language, cultural norms, and access to healthcare resources.
Under The Hood
HEAL.med was built to make healthcare education accessible, engaging, and effective, particularly for individuals managing complex conditions like Type 1 diabetes. It achieves this through flipped learning.
Traditionally, patients receive information and instructions about managing their condition from a healthcare professional during their scheduled appointments. In flipped learning, the sequence is reversed. Patients first engage with the instructional materials at diagnosis in hospital and then are visited by healthcare professionals ready to participate in active discussions that would deepen their understanding of their condition.
HEAL.med makes flipped learning even more fun by providing educational resources in the form of videos, animations, and interactive materials through a user-friendly app. The app contains content that caters to patients of all ages, with a focus on simplicity and clarity. By breaking down complicated medical information into digestible chunks, HEAL.med ensures that users can easily grasp essential concepts related to their health condition. Additionally, the structured education program standardizes and elevates the quality of healthcare education across institutions and regions and ensures consistency in education delivery, regardless of the healthcare provider’s background or expertise in teaching.
One key aspect of HEAL.med's effectiveness lies in its diversity and innovation. The style of animation changes throughout the session. For instance, a group of videos about one part of diabetes will be one style, and then the other part will be a completely different animation style. This variety of animation styles and voices keeps users engaged and refreshed throughout their learning journey. Moreover, HEAL.med constantly updates its content to reflect the latest NICE and NHS guidelines and developments in healthcare, ensuring that users receive accurate and relevant information. Their animations aren’t Pixar-level. Instead, it is done in a way that an average person or regular patient and their family can understand.
Seven years into developing education, HEAL.med has moved beyond constantly updating content. Now, they are looking at areas they have missed and creating new content that they will soon include on the app. “We're looking at creating more content for people with visual impairments, creating more transitional videos for older teenagers, and also looking at making more potential adult-focused content,” says Sarah.
When it comes to revenue, nearly 50% of funding comes from licensing agreements with UK hospitals, which pay an annual fee for access to the app and its educational resources for their patients to have it for free. Healthcare professionals can use the resources offered by HEAL.med to tailor education sessions to the specific needs of each patient. “One of the arguments we make is that while our healthcare professionals trained for years to be healthcare professionals, or for 10 years to understand diabetes, they haven't been trained to be teachers or educators. And it's not their fault. Some are really good at it, some not so much. But we can give them a toolkit to provide that education in a more effective way.”
This approach not only enhances patient engagement but also streamlines the educational process for healthcare providers, reducing hospital bedtime, enhancing re-education, and improving long-term health outcomes.
Beyond the hospital setting, HEAL.med has potential use cases in schools and other educational settings. Additionally, HEAL.med has secured grants and funding from various sources to support ongoing development and expansion efforts. Currently, they are working with Innovate UK and have established a global limited company arm to explore additional funding opportunities and expand its capacity to deliver healthcare education both in the UK and internationally.
Last Words
HEAL.med is a company rooted in people, whether that’s the founders, the team, or the users.
The founders of HEAL.med have always been patient and persistent in the face of challenges. Despite the initial resistance, the trio was successful in nurturing ideas and building a small team and a huge network to draw from.
As they continue to grow, they’re constantly striving to grow and bring more talent in-house to enhance their capacity to undertake larger projects and reach more people.
Another important factor that sets HEAL.med apart is how they listen to their audience and strive to create educational content that will be helpful. For instance, HEAL.med’s efforts to expand their knowledge and reach beyond familiar territory. With a strong foothold in the UK healthcare system, rather than simply exporting the app and its UK-based content, they are working on adapting it thoughtfully to local contexts to ensure clear and effective communication. This approach to global expansion involves understanding the local market and contexts, including cultural differences, access to resources, and language variations. By embracing these challenges, HEAL.med is poised to deliver impactful education tailored to the needs of every community it serves and make a lasting impact on patient’s lives around the world.
We are excited to support HEAL.med as members of StartUp Health’s T1D Moonshot Community.
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Published: Mar 21, 2024