HeLP Digital Community Interest Company (CIC)

In this post Orla O’Donnell from the eHealth Unit talks about the HeLP Diabetes research and rolling it out across the NHS with a not-for-profit social enterprise. 

Current NICE guidance recommends that anyone who is newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes (within the last 9 months) should be offered structured education but all of the current education offered by the NHS is delivered face to face in a group setting. This means that take up can be low as it’s harder for people who work or have caring responsibilities to attend. The offer of online education in addition, or instead of is one potential solution to increasing uptake as it’s more available and attractive to those who cannot or do not want to attend groups. Online interventions are also considerably cheaper to run en masse than repeated face to face sessions and have the added advantage of being able to offer on-going access to information about the condition.

In light of this, Elizabeth Murray and our team at the eHealth Unit have developed an innovative and sophisticated online self-management programme (called ‘HeLP-Diabetes’) and an accompanying structured education pathway (called ‘HeLP-Diabetes: Starting Out’) for adults with type 2 diabetes.

HeLP-Diabetes stands for ‘Healthy Living for People with type 2 diabetes’ and it was developed through funding from an NIHR Programme Grant for Applied Health Research. With the research programme coming to an end next year and due to popular demand for the programme (from CCGs in London and now England wide), Elizabeth decided to set up a not-for-profit social enterprise (a spin out Community Interest Company/CIC) to roll out the programme across the NHS and I’ve been working closely with UCL Business to establish this over the last few months.

In 2014 we applied to, and were successful in being selected for the Health and Social Innovators (HSI) programme; an accelerator programme for small start-up companies offering a 4 month incubator scheme plus financial investment which we will use to cover the costs of setting up the CIC (legal, accountancy fees, etc). The programme involved colleagues and I attending a number of different seminars and workshops on subjects such as financial modelling, marketing, competitor analysis, elevator pitching and legal matters. There were 7 successful ‘Ventures’ who took part and it was a really worthwhile and enjoyable programme. I managed to establish excellent networks and acquired some quite influential business mentors. I’ve since been in contact with colleagues at UCL Partners, and others and have met with some influential people at NHS England, and Diabetes UK as well.

Upon completion of the HSI Programme there were various steps we needed to follow and forms we needed to fill out to set up and become a registered company which we did in June 2015. One of the biggest challenges I had was the protection of IP at the other institutions who had allowed us to use content within the programme, with the nature of academic research being so collaborative, however, persistence paid off and we’re ready to commence with the roll out now all of the collaboration agreements are agreed.

The sales aspect has also been a learning curve but on contacting NHS commissioners to tell them about the programme the initiative has been welcomed (by most) with open arms. I’ve been invited to various meetings to present and am having fun travelling the country to do so! We’ve now got four contracts in progress with CCG’s who are going to commission HeLP-Diabetes which is offered free at the point of delivery as part of a menu of options for patients to choose from.

What’s made my job easier is the fact that good quality, trusted online education for Diabetes was clearly something which was much wanted and needed so the requirement was already there; but also the fact that HeLP is a great product with an excellent team behind it to work with.

Orla O’Donnell (o.o’donnell@ucl.ac.uk)

 

This article presents independent research commissioned by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) through a Programme Grant for Applied Health Research (RP-PG-0609-10135). The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR or the Department of Health.