vCreate & Microsoft Azure connects patients with their families and clinical teams

Creating a secure and scalable platform on Microsoft Azure

This request inspired Neil Patel to work with the vCreate team to create a suitable solution to securely share such important and sensitive videos and images. Supported by NHSGGC and the West of Scotland Innovation Hub, the team chose to build out their new solution on Microsoft Azure.    

“We thought about the scalability and how we could introduce a new platform that would allow us to scale with the demand… And we thought Microsoft Azure just fit the bill,” explains Ben Moore, Founder at vCreate. “Whenever you’re providing health tech, security is absolutely key. We utilise Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure Web Application Firewall v2, so all the technologies that Microsoft provided for us were kind of out of the box, really. It was amazing.” 

vCreate Diaries was piloted by the Glasgow team in 2017. Neil Patel recalls, “I can remember the first three or four families we used it with and the incredible response they had to it.” 

Today, vCreate technology can be found in 80% of UK neonatal units, providing a lifeline for families and healthcare teams. Ben Moore advises, “We would not have been able to scale the way we did during COVID if we hadn’t had the infrastructure that Azure provided for us.” 

The take-up has been an important lifeline for patients’ families. Neil Patel explains, “Our multicentre evaluation families have told us that the system reduces stress and anxiety for parents and helps mothers sleep and provide breastmilk.”

Scaling to address the healthcare challenges

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the vCreate team continued to collaborate with NHSGGC and the West of Scotland Innovation Hub and began to explore how its secure video technology could help other healthcare teams to stay connected with patients and provide safe, new, streamlined care pathways.    

Professor Sameer M. Zuberi, Consultant Paediatric Neurologist at the Royal Hospital for Children in Glasgow, takes up the story: “Parents often find it very difficult to describe the problems they’re seeing in their child so, by taking a video at a time when the child is actively affected by the problem is useful… The key thing about this system is when parents upload their videos they also upload some clinical info about the episode.” 

Professor Sameer M. Zuberi worked with the vCreate team to develop vCreate Neuro.  

“Another benefit for choosing Azure is Azure DevOps. Our development team are able to run and test code very quickly and easily,” states Ben Moore. “We were able to very quickly spin up compute and much higher specification databases which allowed us to scale without disruption to units that wanted the system very quickly.”
 

Incredible impact for patients, families and clinical teams

It’s extraordinary to think that just five or six years later, the system in now being used to share over 500,000 videos and photos securely with patient families and has supported over 50,000 families in that process,” says Neil Patel.  

The hope is now that vCreate Neuro can have a similar impact. Professor Sameer M. Zuberi is also keen to explore how the system might be used to help support medical colleagues working in Ukraine. The technology has already been successfully piloted across the UK in a number of NHS services.  

The solution is already helping to deliver efficiencies in patient care. Professor Sameer M. Zuberi explains, “The Scottish Health Technology Group has looked at the vCreate system and has estimated that we save approximately £675 per patient.” 

Ben Moore concludes, “We’re incredibly grateful to be part of this project, and the wider team that is helping families.”