- £50k awarded to Navenio’s ‘Intelligent Workforce Solution’, improving patient flow and staff/patient safety
- Funding comes from £40m government boost for companies creating cutting-edge technology
- Navenio’s infrastructure-free technology provides ‘right person, right time, right place’ localisation service indoors
London, Oxford, UK. Tuesday, 2nd June 2020. Navenio, the healthcare scale-up whose location-based technology has been shown to double the throughput of hospital teams, has received c. £50k from the UK government and Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, as part of a government boost for cutting-edge companies.
Navenio, a spin-out of Oxford University, provides infrastructure-free indoor location solutions, the equivalent of GPS for use indoors, to power a range of apps and platforms in sectors including healthcare.
Hospitals use Navenio’s AI-led ‘Intelligent Workforce Solution’ (IWS) to assign tasks to healthcare teams based on their location. This helps prioritise workload in real-time on the basis of ‘right person, right time, right place’. The secure system uses smartphones, with no need for investment in new infrastructure from hospital management.
Out of 8,600 applications, the funding was awarded to Navenio by Innovate UK, as part of a wider £40m investment in fewer than 800 businesses, to further develop its IWS solution. The money will enable hospital teams to use IWS for business continuity planning, to handle higher case workload, and to rapidly train and on-board new staff. Other projects benefitting from the funding include virtual reality training platforms for surgeons, virtual farmers’ markets and further innovations borne out of the coronavirus pandemic.
Business Secretary Alok Sharma commented:
“The coronavirus crisis has created challenges that impact the way we live, work and travel, but has also prompted a wave of new innovations as businesses look at ways to solve some of the challenges facing our world today. This funding will support UK start-ups to deliver potential solutions, services and ways of working, and help ensure the long-term sustainability of these businesses.”
As part of a three-month development project, Navenio plans to deliver a significantly enhanced IWS solution, specifically targeting improvements across infection control rapid response cleaning, porter tasking and task management – which is critical not only for dealing with Covid-19 itself, but also the surge of demand as hospitals deal with a large case backlog.
Tim Weil, CEO of Navenio, added: “The long-lasting effects of Covid-19 demands the rapid deployment of logistics teams across hundreds of hospitals, both UK and worldwide. This funding from Innovate UK will help dramatically improve patient flow within hospitals, which in turn will free up beds for new patients and help make sure that scarce resources are available to those who need it most, as well as help protect the frontline staff we all rely on so much.”