23 January 2023
Health innovation company Lifelight has recently announced a partnership with Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care System to provide blood pressure checking at a number of its vaccination centres.
Supported by Wessex AHSN to go live at the Health Hub in Festival Place shopping centre in Basingstoke, the Lifelight self-service kiosk offers patients the opportunity to check their blood pressure whilst attending for their Covid booster.
Lifelight is now available for patients in community settings to check themselves, with on-screen instructions to guide them. As well as providing fast vital signs readings, one of the key benefits of Lifelight is the patient experience - no uncomfortable cuff, no need to undress, no wearables – patients simply look at an iPad screen for 40 seconds. Their vital sign readings – pulse, respiration and blood pressure - are then linked back to their medical records, allowing abnormal readings to be flagged to their GP for any necessary interventions.
43% of people with hypertension in the UK are undiagnosed. Lifelight is already identifying people who have now been advised to continually monitor their blood pressure as a precautionary follow on for a period of time, along with immediate referrals to their GP. Without Lifelight, these patients would not have known they had low or high blood pressure, the latter carrying a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, still the leading global cause of death.
Due to the strong uptake to date by patients, a second self-service kiosk is now being installed at Festival Place and further sites implemented across the county.
Speaking about the rollout, Tim Cooper, Deputy Chief Medical Officer at Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care Board said, “The ability for our patients to have their blood pressure and other vitals checked at the same time as receiving their Covid or flu vaccine just makes sense for both patient and the NHS. We’re finding patients who had no idea they had hypertension getting picked up by Lifelight, allowing us to intervene so they can receive the right care to manage their condition. Too many patients unfortunately only realise they have high blood pressure when they find themselves in hospital with a heart attack or stroke."
"By championing the innovative technology we’re not only caring for our patients better but also helping to ease the burden on our already overstretched emergency departments and other services, especially at this time of year. Given the success at Festival Place, we’re hoping to roll out Lifelight at further sites across Hampshire.”
Laurence Pearce, Lifelight’s CEO & founder said, “According to GOV.UK, the cost to the NHS of high blood pressure is estimated at £2.1bn every year. However, high blood pressure is preventable, and for those with high blood pressure a reduction of just 10mmHg can significantly reduce their risk of a heart attack or stroke. This means identifying, diagnosing and managing hypertension is more vital now than ever, which Lifelight can support either stand-alone using the patient’s own smartphone or at scale embedded into existing healthcare platforms and pathways. We’re driven by the success and acceptance of Lifelight by patients at Festival Place and look forward to having more self-service kiosks at health hubs and diagnostic centres across the UK and beyond.”
Wessex AHSN has supported the company behind Lifelight across the innovation pipeline; helping with device development and validation through to service model evaluation and implementation support at Festival Place. Watch Laurence Pearce, founder of Lifelight company xim, share his story from innovation to adoption in this video (also below).
Last year, our industry team assisted over 250 companies like xim, contributing to the creation or safeguarding of almost 80 jobs and economic growth of £13.8m in sales, grants and investment. Contact us here to find out how we can help you on your innovation journey too.
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About Hampshire & Isle of Wight Integrated Care System
Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care System (ICS) is a partnership of NHS and local government organisations working together to join up health and care services to improve the health and wellbeing of people in the communities we serve.
Our aim is to provide care that is tailored to individual needs, delivered at the right time and in the right place. We will continue to listen to local people to understand how they want services to be designed and developed and will work with them to transform how we provide care.
The development of our Integrated Care System continues well beyond our establishment on 1 July 2022. Building on our progress to date, we continue to work in partnership to help ensure our system thrives and in doing so, enables people in the communities we serve to live longer, healthier lives. For more information visit: https://www.hantsiowhealthandcare.org.uk/
About Wessex Academic Health Science Network
There are 15 Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs) across England, established by NHS England in 2013 to spread innovation at pace and scale – improving health and generating economic growth. Each AHSN works across a distinct geography serving a different population in each region.
We connect NHS and academic organisations, local authorities, the third sector and industry, we are catalysts that create the right conditions to facilitate change across whole health and social care economies, with a clear focus on improving outcomes for patients. This means we are uniquely placed to identify and spread health innovation at pace and scale; driving the adoption and spread of innovative ideas and technologies across large populations. Although we are small organisations – which ensures we remain flexible and responsive to emerging opportunities and challenges – we lead large regional networks. Hence our impact rests in our ability to bring people, resources and organisations together quickly, delivering benefits that could not be achieved alone.
We champion local innovators and work closely with our academic and research partners to drive the latest thinking and healthcare breakthroughs, to ensure healthcare services are at the forefront of innovation for improved patient care and population health. For more information, visit www.wessexahsn.org.uk
About Lifelight
Lifelight is game-changing technology that allows a smartphone or tablet device to measure blood pressure, pulse and breathing rate simply by looking into the device's built-in camera for 40 seconds. Cuff-free, with no additional hardware needed, it saves healthcare staff time while improving the patient experience.
Today Lifelight is addressing health inequalities by detecting patients at risk of CVD early, providing indicative vital signs to allow access to the right care pathway.
With further market approvals on track, Lifelight is set to scale personal healthcare monitoring, through clinically actionable vital signs measurements. The potential is to enable patient-taken observations, leading to safer, easier, and more effective remote triage and monitoring.
Having already achieved CE Class I regulation and 6 clinical studies, Lifelight is also the only rPPG platform built to rigorous medical grade ISO 13485 and IEC 62304 standards - reflecting the relentless focus on the clinically validated, regulated path, to ensure Lifelight provides the greatest impact to patients, pharmaceuticals and healthcare systems globally.
For more information about Lifelight, please visit: https://lifelight.ai/
For further information and imagery, please contact: media@lifelight.ai
i World Health Organization - 2022
ii 43% of people with hypertension in UK are undiagnosed - GOV UK / PHE - 2017
iii Even for the diagnosed 46% do not own a BP cuff - Anbarasan et al – 2021
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