Digital Well being Pitchfest winner CardMedic has secured £411,000 in funding from Innovate UK’s SMART grant programme for its frontline healthcare language app.
The grant will fund a 12-month mission, operating from April 2025 to March 2026, to scale and combine a portal geared toward remodeling how healthcare organisations ship language companies.
CardMedic, which was topped Rewired Pitchfest champion in 2022, will enhance its current resolution to create an AI-enhanced end-to-end language service provision system which allows rapid entry to healthcare content material.
Tim Grimaldi, cofounder and managing director of CardMedic, mentioned: “This funding allows us to understand our long-term imaginative and prescient of creating healthcare communication much more accessible and environment friendly.
“At a time when the NHS is targeted on driving productiveness and bettering affected person care, our resolution gives modern methods to ship top quality language companies rapidly, effectively and the place they have been beforehand unavailable.
“We’re creating an modern resolution that may additional rework how language companies are delivered throughout the NHS.
“This is not going to solely enhance accessibility but additionally create a extra environment friendly and cost-effective system that advantages sufferers, healthcare suppliers and language service suppliers alike.”
The mission will result in improved velocity and accessibility options for the CardMedic frontline app, together with streamlined navigation for folks with English as a second or third language and enhanced efficiency for NHS integration.
This can embody on-demand personalised interpreter companies from translation and interpretation suppliers.
Different enhancements embody adjustable content material sizes for folks with visible impairments, offline, machine agnostic use and optimised panorama viewing enabling sufferers to raised perceive diagnostics and remedy.
CardMedic Join would be the firm’s new portal to permit healthcare suppliers to serve sufferers extra successfully.
It’ll present entry to hundreds of pre-translated scientific interactions at the moment accessible through the CardMedic Frontline app, plus speedier entry to real-time interpreter and language companies.
The combination of AI know-how may even enhance CardMedic’s medical communication database, which the corporate mentioned in a press launch will create “a complete and specialised useful resource”.
This newest funding follows CardMedic’s current £499,683 award from SBRI Healthcare to assist develop an AI-enabled language portal.
The 12-month mission goals to enhance entry to real-time language assist on the level of care inside NHS pressing and emergency care settings, which can in flip assist enhance affected person security and sort out well being inequality.
The SBRI Healthcare funding will assist the corporate with the technical improvement of the CardMedic Join portal, in addition to affected person engagement initiatives and scientific validation.
Collectively, the nationwide funding awards totalling nearly £1 million are anticipated to speed up CardMedic’s mission to enhance healthcare communication and well being fairness throughout UK and US healthcare techniques.
In the meantime, NHS England has raised considerations that the inappropriate use of AI translation apps in healthcare may trigger dangers to affected person security.
The ‘Enchancment framework: group language translation and decoding companies’, printed by NHSE on 27 Might 2025, highlights “considerations in regards to the applicable use of AI translation apps which can be at the moment broadly used throughout the NHS” to speak with sufferers with restricted English.
