Annuo

With less than 50,000 specialists and more 47% of the Australian population (11.8 million people) living with chronic diseases, a 12% increase in the last 8 years alone.

And Australia is not alone. 

47% of people in the world today are living with a chronic disease. 90% of people living with chronic disease die or are disabled from the complications arising from these inadequately managed chronic conditions. And with a rapidly aging and overweight population, this problem is only going to grow. 

People with chronic conditions often feel burdened with the delivery of their health information to their health providers. And if a single health condition involves contact with 3-4 health providers, for the 30% living with over 3 conditions, the burden becomes untenable. 

This impacts their ability to meaningfully engage in their health decision-making and their treatment adherence. Less than 12% of patients living with diabetes follow any part of their treatment plan. And yet they will die 10 years before their peers from the complications of heart disease. 

We are solving the communication and collaboration challenges that create barriers to patient treatment adherence for people living with chronic diseases. 

While digital health has been used as a solution to a lot of the individual subsections of healthcare, a new problem emerged - lack of interoperability has arisen. This lack of quick access to safe health information sharing at is driving the multifactorial problems affecting the health ecosystem, and hampering innovation and research. 

Interoperability and creating a global unified data-driven health workforce is at the forefront of the World Health Organisation, global strategy on digital health 2020-2025 with the understanding that a person-centred approach is required for success. 

Both at an individual level, for the people who have to live with the complications and negative health outcomes, and at a national level due to increased burdens placed on our health systems and financial resources, there is no feasible way to support the vast amounts of people in the community struggling with one of the biggest burdens in the global healthcare ecosystem. 

Combined with the growing global healthcare workforce shortages, which are more pronounced in developing nations, the rates of chronic disease are only going to rise.

Our proposed solution, Annuo is the next Facebook of healthcare. 

For the health providers caring for the 47% of people living with chronic conditions, Annuo will safely amplify their reach by converting a user’s health system needs, behaviours, and usage of health services & therapeutic goods into billable services linked to health incentives. Annuo is delivering true precision medicine. It is making healthcare easy to access, convenient and cost-effective for all.

Annuo was designed with the vision of being a global digital platform for healthcare; for doctors, patients and allied health professionals, facilitating collaborative care that a person can access at any time, from anywhere in the world. With Annuo, healthcare providers easily access the relevant health information of a user and put the information sharing under the control of the user. With fast, access to the most up-to-date clinical information, the best minds in healthcare can confer over an individual medical case (patient)  or solve challenging massive systemic health problems - on a global scale.

Annuo is both vertically and horizontally integrated into the healthcare ecosystem. It is truly specialty, health condition and health provider agnostic. Vertically, it provides better control over the end-to-end patient journey as a seamless experience. The horizontal networking capabilities mean that health policymakers, administrators, payors, organisations, health providers and patients and fully interconnected with one another.

It generates insights into health consumer health & lifestyle behaviours through artificial intelligence analytics, combining traditional analytics with artificial intelligence techniques to automate and enhance the analytics process, allowing for more advanced analysis, and prediction, with the potential for decision-making capabilities. These insights are shared with health providers across healthcare settings for the implementation of health interventions such as health activities; health services; health business strategies; analysis of viability of health service costs; regulation compliance; etc. 

This means: 

Efficiency - streamline healthcare processes

• For patients: easy access to providers & health services
• For providers: easy access to manage their time & communication with patients.

Improved patient care: 

providing patients with access to a wider range of healthcare providers and services.

Reduced costs: 

• For patients: access to competitive pricing for healthcare services
• For providers: streamlining the billing process.

Additionally, the efficiency savings offered by Annuo have the potential impact to eliminate more than $3 billion p.a. of unbudgeted costs to the health system. This means that healthcare budgets focus on investing more resources into services and initiatives that enable more people who are falling through the current gaps to get access to the care they need.

Annuo provides an avenue to address the care gaps that currently exist for Queenslanders in regional and rural areas. By creating digital networks, Annuo aims to connect rural clinicians to a larger ecosystem of healthcare providers and help to bridge the current workforce gaps that exist in rural and regional Queensland. It will also provide vital support to in-person services, allowing people living in remote areas to stay in contact with specialists, reduce their need for travel to receive support and stay engaged with their treatment plan.

Our product serves the full horizontal market of the health ecosystem by putting the patients and their needs at the centre.

This is done by meeting the immediate digital health needs of the health providers (doctors, allied health, administrators and carers) who access the platform on any of the 3 interfaces. 

For safety and security, these interfaces differentiate based on the role of the user.

The company Annuo Medical Technology Solutions Pty Ltd (AMTS) was incorporated in Australia in 2021. 

The Founder

Dr Jeni Wellington is a medical doctor, founder and Chief Executive officer of ATMS. With 15 years of clinical experience,  in clinical, medico-legal and digital health. Dr Jeni Wellington is a recognised leader in digital health and health informatics. She values clinical excellence, ethical practice, continuous professional development, and quality improvement, and applies evidence-based medicine in her practice.

This clinical experience allowed her frontline access to the problems experienced by her patients. However when she lost 5 family members in the space of 2 years to chronic diseases, the problem became both personal and professional to her. This drives her to always put the problem and the people in healthcare at the centre of her solution building.

Recent Recognitions & Awards

• Women in Technology Awards 2023 - Future Focused Business Achiever 2023 Recipient. 
• Official Australian government Delegate to London Tech Week 2023 representing the State of Queensland
• Keynote speaker at the Executive Women Leadership Summit for UN Women Australia in Brisbane 22 November 2023 - Forging impactful leadership
• Panel speaker for World Congress of Medical and Clinical Informatics (MEDInfo) 2023 - presentation of my research into health and social care equity. 
• Panel speaker and round table facilitator for Federal Government Department of Health and Aged Care, Canberra 17 August 2023 
• Panel speaker and round table facilitator for New Zealand Federal Government Department of Health, Wellington 6 November 2023
• Official Panel Speaker for the Queensland Government at the Something Tech 2023

 The value offered by the Team

AMTS is a company that balances the advantages of being a small and a large business: it provides hands-on and flexible digital solutions for healthcare and draws on its rich experience and know-how in the sector. The Annuo project team will work with you to understand any specific requirements and work through the technical and security requirements. Annuo will work with you every step of the way to make sure the settings on Annuo reflect your current operational processes and make the transition to Annuo seamless and hassle-free for staff and patients. Annuo has committed dedicated teams that solely focus on each separate stage of the implementation.

We are an experienced implementation team across digital health solution implementation in clinics utilising a well-understood change management framework for health organisations. This rounded approach ensures the clinical, cybersecurity and business governance branches of implementation are taken into consideration when engaging the stakeholders.

The initial prototype and subsequent pilot was built using low-code techniques and deployed in a primary care centre addressing a single health condition that would require the collaboration of least 3 health providers. 

•  Patient users: over 400 patients organically onboarded the platform
• deployed in the market for over 9 months
• included the active collaboration of 3 health providers and 4 non-clinical health providers
• Reduced clinical incidents associated with treatments following procedures to <5 non-clinical negative outcomes (related to billing/invoicing). 

This feedback was implemented in an expanded product version, with a further prototype of the current product presented to a full spectrum of the health ecosystem - patients, carers, allied health (dietician, psychology, occupational therapist, psychologists) and specialists (gynaecology & obstetrics, surgery, orthopaedics, primary care, dermatology & cosmetic medicine, pain specialists, endocrinology, etc). 

The current product has over 140 clinics under contract to service over 3.5 million users across Australia. 

Dr Jeni Wellington started Annuo after she lost 5 family members to chronic diseases in under 2 years. This made the problems challenges of chronic disease management both personal and professional, as a medical doctor. 

As a female founder with a diverse background in Australia, she has not had access to funding or support, in much the same way as other underrepresented founders have little to no support. The funders or organisations that could offer support have not recognised the deep knowledge and understanding she has of the industry or the market. As such, she has bootstrapped the entire venture with support from a small group of female doctors. 

3 years, a 159-page feasibility study on the global challenges of chronic disease management, a pipeline of >3.5 million users, and a patent later - Annuo is ready to disrupt the chronic disease healthcare space.

Having a large UN organisation invite her and her team to tender Annuo as a global solution to their challenges, has helped to validate the strong value proposition Annuo has to offer as a solution to this global challenge.

More, importantly, we feel the values and objectives on which the MIT Solve program was built meet our values in wanting to ensure health equity for all.

The innovation in our solution, Annuo, is attributable to our agnostic health user-centric approach to developing customer relationship management (CRM) software specifically for the health sector (referred to as ‘Annuo’). 

We have a patent pending on our artificial intelligence analytics in Annuo which provides clinicians with improved data for clinical decision-making and research. 

Our technology has been applied to:

• Value-based user matching
• Improve pharmacovigilance and patient safety through the ability to make more informed medical decisions based on directly delivered information to the patients
• Increase the identification of risk factor pattern recognition and presentation to the health providers
• Widening the possibilities for prevention of diseases by identification of risk factors for disease
• Support health providers with access to actionable features, therefore increasing the rate of the timely implementation of effective and quality treatments by the discovery of early signals and disease intervention.
• Reducing the probability of adverse reactions through patient-reported outcomes and monitoring
• Predicting present and future health outcomes based on health behaviours.

The users communicate through any of our 3 interfaces that differentiate based on user roles and permissions; 

• health consumers, their families and carers (mobile app) 
• health providers (web app on Tablet/laptop/desktop). 
• health organisation/clinic Administrators (web app on Tablet/laptop/desktop)

We believe the synchronicity Annuo provided of enhanced value-based user matching, promotion of continuous and timely user communication and ease of user collaboration is the embodiment of person-centred care needed for chronic diseases.

For example;

• Using Annuo's administrator's interface, an administrator can grant access to patient users and prescribing capabilities by simply providing the user's name and board credentials. 
• Annuo’s health provider user interface provides a landing page that displays the practitioners’ prescribing history and patterns in subscriptions, encouraging the practitioner to review their prescribing practices & putting prescribing culture front of mind. 
• The patient-end-user medication consumption (medication reconciliation), interactions (outcome measures) and requests can be viewed, analysed and shared with the prescriber in real-time across private & public healthcare systems, and international jurisdictions making Annuo the singular reference point for a patient's consumption of restricted medications.
• The health provider seeking peer-review input into their prescribing can send consent for permission to share a profile with international colleagues in higher institutions locally or overseas
• The patient-end-user can consent and select the relevant medication information to with the other health providers directly from the mobile app and share.
• If there are questions during the teleconference requiring further health profile information the request is sent in real-time conferring faster decision-making for added treatment recommendations. 

This can bridge the health specialist workforce shortages and associated mid-career clinical experience gaps that exist in healthcare today caused by occupational burnout.