Saran Muthiah, NHS Clinical Entrepreneur, CEO and Founder of Enrich My Care

Hello Saran –

Can you tell me about Enrich my Care?

Enrich My Care is a unique personalised health and care platform, a user-driven innovation to meet the complex needs of children and young people with disabilities and/or long-term conditions.

I believe the best ideas come from solving a problem you’re experiencing yourself. Enrich My Care was created to improve communication and coordination of care – critical to improving the health outcomes of patients.

Care pathways can be very complex. Patients, and carers of children with disabilities and long-term conditions, often find it extremely difficult to manage individual care needs and negotiate pathways spanning a range of organisations and agencies – potentially involving up to 20 health and care professionals in different settings. And It’s not just a challenge for children and families. This complexity can also be challenging for the health and care providers themselves – and for teachers.

Over the past 20 years working as a Specialist Children’s Physiotherapist, I have repeatedly seen these challenges, in acute and community settings. My colleagues and I spend hours of our time trying to navigate the disjointed care pathways including trying to access right information at the right time, track and monitor our care plans – time that we would prefer spending with children delivering the much-needed care.

The idea for Enrich My Care was born from my personal frustration of experiencing these challenges time and time again and in response to conversations with families and professionals about their lived experience – I knew I wanted to do something about it.

How have you involved users of the platform – and what has been their feedback so far?

We have been talking and engaging with children, young people and their families from day one. We’ve needed to understand what really matters to them and their ‘pain points’ – and challenge our own preconceptions about what is and isn’t a challenge for users. It’s been a really interesting journey and we’re grateful to everybody that’s been part of that.

I’d say this is a user-driven innovation from the idea stage. We’ve gone back to talk with families and charity groups who were involved in our early conversations about Enrich My Care. They’ve fed back that they expected the platform to be helpful, but it’s now so much more than that. We see that as a huge compliment.

Our user engagement has enabled development of the platform to meet the bespoke unmet needs of users, with workflows designed to meet even the smallest of needs.

Children and young people with disabilities will spend a lot of time in school or nurseries – other technology solutions haven’t had the integration capabilities to include educational settings.

In addition, these other platforms have also focused on access to health records for patients – a good starting point for personalised healthcare but we felt that alone won’t solve the challenges for the users we are designing for. We place importance on day-to-day care management and collaboration – we’re solving the problem by streamlining the entire care pathway.

What would you say are your successes on your journey?

Building partnerships. Early on we realised we couldn’t do this alone and we’d need partners to make an impact. We’ve fostered relationships with a range of organisations including charities, NHS organisations and continuous user research with multi-disciplinary teams in healthcare and education.

We’ve been awarded £20k match funding by Medilink Midlands which has been really helpful to develop the platform further, and £20k funding from the Welsh Government for skills development.

Enrich My Care has been shortlisted for a number of awards – including the Medilink Midlands Start-Up Award, Top 10 Start-Ups in Rewired Pitchfest London, and Venturefest in the Midlands. And I am particularly proud of participating in the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme.

What connections / partnerships are you seeking to make for the next stage of your business growth?

We are looking for opportunities to scale up our existing platform at a system-level and work with Integrated Care System partners from health, care and education as collaborative partners for real-world evaluation pilots.

Our key focus now is to build upon the work that we have done with user testing and generate real world evidence. We are particularly delighted to be working with NIHR CYP MedTech, fostering strong ties with Children and Young People’s Alliance and their patient and family groups. We are also seeking to identify and work closely with clinical champions in health and care organisations.

We are also looking for funding to accelerate our scale-up activity – we’re looking for £450k seed investment from early-stage VCs or angels specialising in healthcare.

And finally, can you tell us about your experience of participating in the P4SY Accelerator Programme?

P4SY has been hugely helpful in steering Enrich My Care in the right direction. I would say the Programme has provided guidance with a personal touch!

We’ve participated in other accelerator programmes which have been very helpful, but the time taken by P4SY to understand our specific needs and connect us with the right people has definitely accelerated our journey. The support we’ve received has been very valuable.

You can find out more through the Enrich My Care website, watching demo video content or contacting saran@enrichmycare.com