Hill Dickinson advises The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust on deal with Babylon Health for citywide coverage of new covid-19 app

The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust (RWT) has become the first provider to sign up with digital health company Babylon Health for provision of its innovative ‘covid-19 care assistant’ app. 

The app provides patients with digital triage, a live chat service, a symptom tracker and video consultation and is due to be made available to the general public in the week commencing 6 April. It will cover around 300,000 patients who are registered to a Wolverhampton GP, as well as all trust staff regardless of where they live. 

Jamie Foster, a partner in Hill Dickinson’s life sciences team, advised RWT, together with David Hill, partner, and Christiana Demetriou, associate, of the firm’s healthcare team. Jamie Foster said the deal provided a vital additional resource for RWT, saying: 

‘The NHS has been quick in recent years to adopt the huge advantages in healthcare offered by digital healthtech companies and never more so than now when it is facing unprecedented challenges due to COVID-19.

‘This deal was agreed in record time. It means that the Trust and the Wolverhampton general public have access to an app that will help manage resource and direct assistance to where it is needed most. I’m delighted to have been able to work alongside the RWT as legal adviser to make this happen.’

Once registered for the service, patients will be able to use the app to check their symptoms. Those with medium severity symptoms will be given access to a live chat with a Babylon staff member or clinician.

Patients can continue to access the app during self-isolation. Any patients who need video appointments will then be provided with access to a clinician from Royal Wolverhampton Trust.
RWT has been one of the worst hit trusts in terms of patient deaths from covid-19 as part of an identified ‘hot spot’.

David Loughton, chief executive at RWT, said the app will provide ‘additional support to staff and patients and a practical way to relieve pressure from the system’.

Sultan Mahmud, director of innovation, integration and research for RWT who led on the deal, said: ‘All this is rooted in having a digital overlay for services and so, as we approach the peak, any help to support patients and staff, extra information, whether it is on an interactive basis or otherwise, is a good thing.

‘We are all working extremely hard to tackle COVID-19, but in everything you’ve got to find some positive and I think the positive in this is that this is an innovation and using the best of technology to help the situation and we need to learn from the experience of this and move at pace across the NHS.’