blood pressure monitor

Digital health software developed by The George Institute for the treatment of heart failure is acquired by Sensyne Health

Sensyne Health has acquired the SUPPORT-HF™ digital health software developed by researchers at The George Institute for Global Health at the University of Oxford. SUPPORT-HF has been designed to help patients and clinicians in managing heart failure and curate data for medical research using clinical Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Following six years of research and development, and a 30-month, 202-person randomised controlled trial, due to be submitted for publication in late 2018, Sensyne Health plan to develop a cloud-based, scalable version of SUPPORT-HF to help support the management of heart failure in the community.

Professor Kazem Rahimi, Honorary Consultant Cardiologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford and Chief Investigator of SUPPORT-HF at The George Institute, commented:

“This simple software enables heart failure patients to understand and monitor their condition and take control of their treatment in their own homes. An affordable, sustainable system, it has the potential to not only empower patients, but to strengthen the health system to bring specialist knowledge to non-specialists.”

Heart failure affects 26 million people worldwide and is now considered a global epidemic. In the UK, 900,000 patients are estimated to have the disease, and almost as many have damaged hearts but have not yet shown symptoms of heart failure. Heart failure is currently the leading cause of hospital admissions for those aged 65 years and older with admissions expected to rise by 50% over the next 25 years. The management of heart failure represents a significant cost burden to the NHS, with 1-2% of the total annual budget estimated to be spent on the condition.

SUPPORT-HF is the fourth digital health software product Sensyne Health, a British clinical AI technology company, has acquired as part of its five-year strategic research agreement with the University of Oxford and Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

The collaboration between Sensyne Health, the University of Oxford and the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, established in July 2017, creates a pathway for the commercial development of digital health innovations invented and clinically validated by the University and the Trust.

Dr James Groves, Senior Licensing and Ventures Manager at Oxford University Innovation, the technology transfer company for this collaboration, said:

“SUPPORT-HF is another example of cutting-edge digital health technology coming out of Oxford, created through the cross-disciplinary collaboration between doctors, engineers and software developers. We look forward to seeing this technology making a positive difference to the workload of doctors, the finances of the NHS and the health of patients suffering from heart failure.”