Hambro Perks leads Aide's $1.2 million pre-seed for long-term illness digital care app

London-based digital health app startup Aide Health just raised $1.2 million in pre-seed funds to bring its digital platform for managing long-term health conditions to more UK patients and their clinicians.

The round is led by global investment portfolio Hambro Perks' EIS fund and also includes funding from Fuel Ventures, 1818 Ventures and APX.

Aide Health's platform allows clinicians to remotely monitor chronic disease health plans. The platform can then be paired up with Aide's consumer-end mobile app for the patient, guiding them through managing the condition day-to-day.

More than 26 million people in the UK have some kind of health problem that's going to persist into the long term, with 50% of patients failing to follow their doctor's treatment advice, Aide says.

This can impair quality of life as the long-term health condition progresses but it can also absorb strained public healthcare resources, as the patient may present more serious symptoms further down the line.

Aide's app can create natural language for brief text chats with the patient on a daily basis, assisting them with medicines (over-the-counter, and prescriptions), personalised advice, and questions that reveal how the patient is doing that day.

A pilot launched earlier this year was taken on by the UK National Health Service, targeting 18-75 year olds with asthma or type-2 diabetes. Aide says it's focused on conditions that often present in comorbidity (i.e. with two of the diagnoses in one patient), starting with its next digital treatment plans for chronic pain and hypertension.

In a press statement exclusively emailed to Tech.eu, Ian Wharton, co-founder and CEO at Aide Health, predicted the NHS pilot is the first step to Aide being provided to every NHS patient with chronic illness. "Like many people, I know first-hand the frustrations of trying to manage long-term conditions.

"Our goal is to give both patients and clinicians the tools and insights they need to have better conversations and make more informed treatment decisions together," Wharton said.