Hospify was a secure and compliant messaging system for use in UK and European healthcare, intended to give both patient and clinicians an alternative to non-compliant consumer messaging tools such as WhatsApp.
Hospify used an innovative technical architecture, based on microserver technology and edge processing, that was designed specifically to handle health communications at scale in accordance with health information governance and data protection legislation and best practice. This enabled it to protect the privacy of all parties while still being able to offer a service that was free at the point of use.
The free chat platform was funded by subscriptions to the Hospify Hub, a browser-based admin tool that allowed institutions to onboard and validate app users and communicate with them via broadcast messages and authorised group chat.
Hospify raised £1m and was adopted by users in over 200 healthcare institutions before going out of business in 2021, unable to raise further funding or sell enough Hub subscriptions when the UK government relaxed enforcement of data protection regulation during and after the Covid-19 pandemic.
Hospify also included a plan, developed in 2018 in association with the WMG Data Science Group at the University of Warwick, to introduce an AI assistant that would provide relevant medical information in-app, in real time, based on the content of a chat stream between between clinical professionals and/or between patient and clinician.
In contrast to other such services, which compromise data privacy by sending sensitive personal information back to a central server, the Hospify Assistant was designed to use Hospify’s unique “phone-as-microserver” architecture and federated machine learning techniques to allow the AI assistant to respond while ensure that identifiable personal data was never sent to the central servers or held in the cloud at all, almost completely eliminating the risks of data breach and non-compliance that are associated with technology of this kind.
Alas, the funding applications that would have enabled a prototype to be developed were not granted, a great shame, given how much the world of AI has evolved since – without solving this problem.
