Mission and Vision

Healthcare as we know it is becoming unaffordable. Through a combination of longer life expectancy, better treatments, and stagnant productivity, health spending is consuming a constantly growing share of GDP around the world. We are not constrained by diagnostics, treatments, or medical knowledge, but by our ability to deploy these consistently and efficiently for every patient. We see this failure in the hospital waiting lists, A&E waiting times, and the healthcare worker strikes. But perhaps most starkly, we have seen healthy life expectancy fall by two years over the past decade, and avoidable mortality is still higher than pre-COVID levels. The need for radical change could not be more clear.

We're on a mission to solve healthcare productivity.

Solve = reversing the trend of spiralling healthcare costs Productivity = maximising good patient outcomes per pound spent.

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We have two reasons for immense optimism that this trend can be reversed, and that we at Accurx can do it.

Firstly, we have proven a fundamentally new model of care delivery over the past decade. We’ve shown care delivery doesn’t have to happen in appointments, but can take far less clinician time if it happens over messaging, as well as being much more efficient for patients. We’ve shown that patients with long-term conditions can be risk-stratified, with appointments then focused on the patients who need them. We’ve proven that a triage-led model of primary care, responsive to patient need, is superior to an appointment-led model that predates the NHS. In the best total triage practices they’re resolving 40% of demand without an appointment, and 100% of patients who need an urgent appointment get one on the same day.

Secondly, the world is going through a new industrial revolution, that will see large swathes of work be automated by AI. Unlike previous generations of healthcare IT, now technology can unlock vast productivity gains. It is not yet clear how this will happen and the world is trying to figure out how to fit AI into the healthcare workflow. We have spent eight years betting on healthcare going asynchronous, which lends itself perfectly to automation.

For the past eight years we have focused on fixing healthcare communication, underpinned by a belief that healthcare is a communication industry. That belief still holds, and our conviction has only grown over time. But we’ve also earned the right to go after something bigger. So as we turn ten, we’re expanding our mission and vision to position ourselves to solve healthcare productivity over the next decade, so that everyone can access great care.

Our vision is that every patient gets gold-standard, efficient, and joined up care.

Every patient = universal, timely access to care Gold-standard = care is based on published guidelines/evidence, and tacit knowledge of experts Efficient = eliminating waste in the system Joined up = frontline staff in different providers work as one team

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Strategy (~3 years) To achieve our mission, we are going to drive three major shifts across the health system, all of which we believe are inevitable over time. These strategic anchors should persist over the next three years, and for any decision we make, they should act as a filter: Will it make care asynchronous? Will it connect all staff? Will it automate healthcare work?

Make care asynchronous We have already led the way and demonstrated huge productivity gains by moving activity from appointments to messaging. We’ll spread this shift from general practice to the wider system, going beyond just appointments to tackle emergency and inpatient care. This shift also paves the way for full automation - when care happens over messaging, agents and humans can handoff seamlessly.
Connect all staff Healthcare will continue to be delivered by frontline staff across different providers, and we have long held the vision that they can work as a single team around a patient. That care team will soon include AI agents, who need a way to seamlessly interface with others.

GP practices act as the hub of a patient’s care, so we’ll lean on the trust and adoption of GP practices to build a dense and defensible communication network. The combination of product convergence, neighbourhood working pull, the ability for AI to assist (e.g. drafting responses) means we are now able to make this vision a reality.
Automate healthcare work Healthcare will be automated. This will happen by thousands of hyper-specific agents, performing narrow tasks that can be validated and understood by humans to build trust. This means no company will build all the automations, but one company could be the dominant platform on which agents are hosted. Most of these agents require the same pool of context and tools, many of which we have already.

To build an effective agent platform we’ll first build our own ‘anchor agents’ for common use cases, such as handling patient triage requests. We’ll then let users build their own agents and bring them to market. This taps into the latent innovation and expertise of thousands of frontline staff who can test them with their patients, and now don’t need software engineering skills.