Oxford Heartbeat wins AI in Health and Care Award

London, 8 September 2020 – Oxford Heartbeat is proud to announce that it is one of the winners of the UK Government’s inaugural AI in Health and Care Award. The Award was announced by Matt Hancock, the Minister of State for Health, at the Founders Forum during the London Tech Week. The award puts Oxford Heartbeat at the frontline of a pioneering push to bring digital transformation to healthcare in the UK.

Held for the first time to encourage the integration of promising new technologies in the NHS, the AI in Health and Care Award is an initiative jointly organised by three UK Government bodies: NHSX, the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and the Accelerated Access Collaborative (AAC). A total of £140 million will be dispensed over three years, with the aim of testing and evaluating AI systems that have the highest propensity of fulfilling the goals set out in the NHS Long Term Plan.

Oxford Heartbeat was selected from a fiercely competitive pool of 530 applications for the award, all boasting innovations at the forefront of digital health. The award will fund a pilot of its CE marked medical software PreSize® Neurovascular at five NHS hospitals. The pilot allows PreSize® to demonstrate improvements that the technology makes on decision support for planning of high-risk brain surgeries. More crucially, Oxford Heartbeat is able to gather best evidence that PreSize® would benefit more widespread usage across the NHS. 

Piloting PreSize® with NHS Trusts enables Oxford Heartbeat to realise its commitment to help the NHS fulfill one of the goals in its Long Term Plan, which is to deliver world-class care for major health problems including heart diseases and strokes, as well as improve the efficiency of clinical practice.

“We want to enable the safest and more accurate treatment for people suffering from common vascular diseases such as aneurysms, without having to worry about surgical complications,” said Dr Katerina Spranger, CEO of Oxford Heartbeat. “We are grateful that this award will accelerate the use of our PreSize® technology into NHS hospitals where brain stenting procedures are performed. In addition, we are looking forward to collecting evidence that PreSize® can radically improve the way that brain surgeries are performed, offering clinicians a whole new level of safety and precision that was not the norm before. The award is testament to the extraordinary dedication and hard work of our entire team.”

Securing the recognition of the UK government is a definitive nod to the novel technology that Oxford Heartbeat’s team has created over years of meticulous effort. The win also streamlines Oxford Heartbeat’s work with the goals of the NHS, affirming its status as one of the most innovative digital health companies in the country.