Health Delivered provides clinical dietary advice to clinicians and individuals, right at their fingertips. Ahead of joining Health Horizon Innovation Alley at the World Hospital Congress in October, CEO Pete Saunders shared some of the challenges and triumphs of Health Delivered so far.
What is your health innovation? What does it aim to do?
Health Delivered is a dietary management platform designed to tackle the growing rates of obesity, diabetes and other chronic health issues.
The platform offers a cloud-based solution that integrates complex scientific information, lifestyle and food preferences and a range of medical conditions to create personalised meal plans in minutes.
This same platform enables other health care organisations to implement our meal planning outputs into their care plans at the press of a button through our API.
We are the only company currently turning clinical dietary rules into algorithms that can be accessed by any health care professional in any existing workflow.
How is your innovation relevant to hospitals?
Hospital dietitians are often part-time and not always consulted in out-patient management. Therefore, meal plans are left to print outs and generic information. This is difficult and sometimes impossible to follow by patients. As diet plays a major factor in rehabilitation, recovery, and reducing re-admissions, enabling more personalised and clinically validated care as part of standard out-patient care will reduce the cost and burden of re-admissions.
What challenges have you come up against in developing your health innovation? What motivated you to keep going?
Translating clinical requirements into consumer outcomes is a massive challenge. To ensure accuracy along with human-friendliness requires multiple rounds of testing to get right.
Similarly, diet is a complex challenge, with over 50,000 variables for any one individual. Documenting and digitizing those variables into a series of algorithms has been the backbone of the work to date.
Motivation is driven when we see great outcomes — when a diet solves for the first time or when we speak to our customers and they understand what we’re doing and its importance.
What is one thing the public could do to help your innovation to succeed?
Take a look and tell the people they know! Everyone knows a doctor, a nurse, a pharmacist, a dietitian, or nutritionists. Health care workers can all benefit from this and we are looking to work with a wider range of specialties to improve the breadth of our offering.
Our technology is ready to implement into an existing workflow and we need support to test this as we continue to improve the service and get it into as many hands as possible.
What is the next step for your innovation?
Integrating our API into multiple providers. We are a clinical dietetics engine and need to place it in the hands of people who need it most. This can be done through any digital workflow so we want to increase the roadmap of integration work to be done.
What are the benefits of developing your innovation in Australia?
Great lifestyle — including music, culture, and coffee. The tax incentive for R&D is a very handy boost. And Australia is an under utilized test bed for innovation — we can run any number of scenarios that will translate around the world.
A final word:
Improving diet as part of the out-patient process would see a huge impact on the health care system, not just in Australia but around the world. We understand that there is a risk associated with piloting a start-up, but we have the team and technology to deliver solid results.
Health Delivered is one of twelve Australian health innovations being showcased by Health Horizon at the 2018 World Hospital Congress in Brisbane. Find out more about our diverse Innovation Alley cohort here.
Heading to WHC? Be sure to check out the Health Horizon Innovation Alley Stands 65–70. Chat and learn more about our great cohort, search our 1000+ database of Australian innovations, and add your own innovations to our growing global database.