Health-tech start-up Aide Health has been selected for Bupa’s eco-Disruptive programme, which champions 18 eco start-ups to support Bupa’s journey towards net zero.
Aide Health has been selected for its potential to reduce hospital admissions, healthcare-associated travel and medicine waste by empowering patients to better manage long-term health conditions.
Aide is now working with teams at Bupa to further develop its conversational AI platform that helps people manage long-term conditions such as diabetes, asthma and hypertension. The impact of Aide has been demonstrated in an NHS pilot where medical adherence amongst patients with type 2 diabetes and asthma increased to 75% from an average of 45-50%.
Today, 4% of all road travel is attributed to the NHS and its users, and the environmental impact of one hospital bed day is almost 64kg of CO2. By helping improve self-management and reducing the need for unplanned GP visits, Aide has the potential to make a measurable reduction in healthcare related carbon emissions. Aide and Bupa are also exploring ways to increase patient awareness of medicine waste and safe medicine disposal.
Ian Wharton, founder and CEO of Aide, said:
Aide and Bupa share a similar desire for the future state of healthcare and to help people live healthier, happier lives. Being selected as one of six UK companies for this initiative is a big step forward in our team’s ability to achieve our ambitions. We not only want to help millions of people better manage their health, but we want to do so with lower-carbon healthcare delivery, be it through reducing medicine waste or service overuse."
Aide also specialises in asthma management, promoting the appropriate balance of preventer and reliever inhaler use. With the amount of C02 from just one reliever inhaler equivalent to driving 175 miles in a small hatchback, Aide is keen to raise awareness of low-carbon inhalers. Their recent partnership with Suffolk Primary Care is helping patients better understand and adhere to their preventer inhalers, providing health and environmental benefits.
About Aide Health
Launched in 2021, Aide Health is a digital health service that helps patients and their clinicians better understand and manage long-term conditions. The service connects a browser-based tool for the clinician (enabling the creation and remote monitoring of Health Plans for people with chronic disease) with a mobile app for the patient, which serves as a 24/7 companion through prescribed care.
About Bupa eco-Disruptive
Bupa employees, entrepreneurs and start-ups come together to tackle sustainability challenges within our business and the health sector. Our goal is to find and support scalable start-ups where we can add value to their sustainability solutions. The programme started in 2021 and runs across five countries or regions where Bupa operates: Australia, Spain, UK, Hong Kong SAR and New Zealand.
