Real-time location tracker so hospital workers get to the patients that need their help the most
Navenio is an indoor location tracker that works like a sat-nav to guide hospital support teams so they can be at the right place, at the right time to deliver care to patients. Its value to the NHS could be as much as £4bn through cost savings and productivity gains.
In the same way that GPS transformed the great outdoors, Navenio’s infrastructure-free location technology is doing something very similar indoors. For those that work in hospitals, this is changing the way they work for the better.
– Nikki Trigoni, co-founder and CTO at Navenio
As Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, Trigoni’s work focused on cyber-physical systems for good. She found that existing operations systems were archaic and impacting on delivery of care, which led to the development of Navenio. It uses smartphone data and a combination of motion tracking, multi-floor localisation, and signal mapping to locate hospital staff and share automated tasks that guide them to where the patient need is greatest.
Five years of successful testing and pilots in the NHS has proved the effectiveness of Navenio when used with vital on-the-ground teams like porters, cleaners, and caterers. They were able to carry out their roles more effectively, with hospitals seeing a two to three times improvement in the number of tasks completed. Then Covid-19 suddenly presented a more urgent and lifesaving need for the technology.
That’s where Innovate UK came in. Thanks to a £392,016 grant from the “Ideas to Address Covid-19” fund, Navenio was able to adapt and upgrade its software to meet the demands of the pandemic. The grant allowed Navenio to incorporate new functions such as alerts that would remind staff to sanitise environments and real-time data analytics so operations teams could help hospital staff reach patients more effectively and safely.
The Innovate UK grant became a springboard for further success. Navenio to date has secured £28.1m of investment and grants allowing it to conduct further real-world trials. Its most recent has been across seven NHS hospitals. Recent data from NHS England showed that across the hospitals there was a 31% reduction in response time and a £1.2m increase in productivity. The time freed up was the equivalent of putting 27 full-time nurses back onto the wards.
For those NHS hospitals using Navenio, the improved flow of tasks meant that teams were working smarter not harder, patients had a better experience, and critical hospital beds were released quicker. Jo Moon, a radiology superintendent whose team use Navenio, says, “It gives us visibility so we know when porters accept tasks, an estimate of when they will arrive, and their progress through the task, none of which we had before. It has really improved the situation for staff and patients alike.”
The impact of the innovation has accelerated Navenio’s growth. It scaled by 153% in 2021 alone. Now, with its sights set on US expansion, it has appointed a new leadership team with Connie Moser as CEO, Andrew Loveless as CRO and Victoria Gray as General Counsel alongside Trigoni. Trigoni herself was named CI/TO of the Year at the 2023 Women In IT Awards in recognition for her work ensuring that quick, safe care reaches those patients that need it the most.