Jon Hoeksma of E-Health Insider reports on Vodafone Ventures, the VC arm of Mobile operator Vodafone, making an investment in t+ Medical
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The company was founded as a spin out from Oxford University in 2002 as e-San by Professor L. Tarassenko, and rebranded as t+ Medical in 2006 following success of it’s t+ Diabetes System. It has been a leading light in the mHealth market with recent growth following a £4 million investment from Comvest, SRPE and a consortium of UK Doctors, which has helped it expand the service into the American market.
T+ Medical’ most prominent product is a service for diabetics that has patients submitting their blood sugar levels via text and answering simple questionnaires. The company has invested in its own dedicated medical call centre enabling it to offer health care providers a one stop shop to outsource their patient care.
Tim Clover, CEO of t+ Medical told E-Health Insider that although t+ Medical offered a range of chronic disease management programmes – for areas including diabetes, COPD, cancer, cystic fibrosis and hypertension – customers to date had mainly been PCTs interested in “admissions management and reduction”. He also said the benefit of working with Vodafone, the largest mobile phone company in the world, was that it gave t+ Medical a partner with the ability to rapidly deploy services at true scale. While PCTs are currently buying services for 1,000-3,000 patients at a time, Clover said the aim was to offer services at a much larger scale: “We’re talking about trying to take this out to a couple of million patients.” He added: “The problem our industry is having is how you go from a few pilot customers with contracts of a 1,000 patients to 10,000, 100,000 or a million. We don’t know how to do it, but Vodafone does, they run the world’s largest data infrastructure.”
This is great news for t+ Medical who have been key evangelists for mHealth initiatives in the NHS, a big congratulations to the team who got the company this far… it’s going to be great to see the services getting the chance to scale.
[…] Whilst I was surprised that every speaker felt the need to explain to this informed audience how global populations are aging and levels of chronic disease are rising, I was disappointed that no one offered inspiring stories of entrepreneurial medics or patient experiences. The world may be alive with pilot projects that we all agree offer immense promise but to move beyond the conceptual stage the mobile industry needs to be putting forward entrepreneurial Healthcare professionals who are open to being challenged. Of the speakers the one that seems to have moved furthest along the mHealth path appeared to be Vodafone who included a slide about their recent investment in UK mHealth pioneers t+ Medical. […]