Digital health firm secures £50,000 funding
Liverpool digital health venture Doctoria secures £50,000 from Innovate UK to develop its technology for helping ethnic minority patients overcome language barriers. Tony McDonough reports
A Liverpool health technology firm has secured £50,000 to develop its teleconsulting app that can improve health outcomes for ethnic minority patients.
Doctoria’s video consultation platform for registered medical professionals is run by a team of digital entrepreneurs. They now want to provide better support for patients for whom the language barrier increases the risk of poor service or even misdiagnosis.
Building on the success of its current teleconsulting service, the app aims to provide patients and remote healthcare professionals with a real-time verbal translation of a clinical consultation.
It will provide visual communication aids to support dialogue between both parties. The £50,000 is coming from Innovate UK.
Doctoria co-founders said: “The funding from Innovate UK will help our team jump to the next stage of development. It allows us to progress more rapidly in conducting a two-month pilot test of the app with two target patient groups – Romanian and Punjabi speakers.
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“This research will help us to understand the patient requirements, while also enabling us to develop and test the effectiveness of the app.
“We have already seen the success that our current platform has brought to healthcare service providers such as the Northway Clinic in east London and we are delighted that Innovate UK will be supporting us as we expand and enhance the service.”
Dr Stephen Katebe a practising GP, member of the Royal College of GPs and clinical advisor to Doctoria, said: “This application is focused on the development and realisation of more effective ways of delivering healthcare services to patient groups that often fail to interact with healthcare services effectively owing to linguistic, cultural or socio-economic factors.”