Cera, Europe’s largest HealthTech, is making an eight-figure investment to build the world’s first AI Lab for care sector, backed by UK Government. The initiative aims to address the global care capacity crisis by rapidly building, proving, and licensing high-impact AI tools to transform health systems, solving productivity and accessibility challenges internationally.
Its new AI Lab aims to solve a growing care gap, building on Cera’s existing technology stack that identify health risks with over 80% accuracy, halving avoidable hospital admissions.
“As the population ages, healthcare systems globally are drowning in demand,” said Dr Ben Maruthappu, founder & CEO of Cera. “The critical way to solve this crisis is by using technology – from AI algorithms to robotics – to empower healthcare workers to achieve more with less”
The Lab will draw on Cera’s dataset of over 300 billion highly secure, anonymised patient health insights, gathered by over 10,000 carers and nurses across 2.5 million patient home visits monthly, to develop cutting-edge new tools. It will build, evaluate, and then deploy AI solutions into the homes of real patients, while continuously assessing their impact.
Cera has partnerships with two-thirds of NHS care regions and over 100 UK Local Governments, which enables it to roll out new tools at speed and scale, building a real-world evidence-base to show they work safely. Once proven, it will license its AI tools to healthcare providers globally.
“By proving this technology works at a national scale in the UK, we are creating a blueprint that can be exported globally through our AI Lab, to fix broken healthcare systems worldwide, keeping patients out of hospital and in the comfort of their own homes,” said Maruthappu.
Launched in November 2016, Cera combines at-scale home care delivery with in-house data and AI development capability, as well as its own robotics arm. Its carers and nurses provide services covering a population of 30 million people across the UK and Germany. It has circa US$500m in annualised revenues.
