The Pioneer interview with... Ben Moore

Ben Moore is the Founder of vCreate, a secure video service for healthcare providers.

Ben was an early adopter of video technologies on the web and initially worked on developing software that integrated video into web applications. He then founded vCreate, which started as a video marketing business before it began providing video-specific solutions.

However, since their prominent role in developing the NHS Trusted Secure Clinical Video service, which began with the Glasgow Neonatal Unit, Ben and his team have solely focused on providing video solutions in healthcare, connecting patients, families and clinical teams for improved diagnostic management and enhanced family-focused care.

How was the initial challenge from the Glasgow Neonatal Unit understood? Where did it come from, and where did you get the initial breakthrough?

In 2016, we got an email from Dr Neil Patel, a Consultant Neonatologist based in the Glasgow Neonatal Unit. They were early adopters of Family Integrated Care, the philosophy of involving families in every step of a baby’s healthcare journey. This is based on the proven idea that communication between families and the unit leads to more effective care.
 
Neil had found vCreate online and thought we could help. One of the parents, a mechanic, had approached Neil and asked if he could have video updates of how his baby was doing, in the same way he sent videos of the car repairs to his customer. When Neil emailed us, we had a long chat, and it was really a case of “This is such a simple idea. Why isn’t anyone doing this already?”.

Executing it was more complicated. The sensitivity of these videos meant there were safety and privacy issues, with clear challenges of governance and appeasing all the relevant parties, including parents and the hospital staff. So we talked to the parents to understand their appetite for these videos and to the Neonatal staff to ensure it wouldn’t impact clinical duties.
 
As you’d expect, all the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
 
So we developed the Neonatal Diary system, allowing nurses to record videos of babies in their cots and share them with parents, building a private diary for that family of the baby’s progress. This included highlighting milestones that families often missed, such as the first time a baby opens its eyes or its first time off a ventilator. It enhances the bonding experience between the infant and their family whilst also improving the relationship between families and the clinical team.
 
In all, it took 9 months from our initial conversation with Neil, which included lots of testing of the platform, enhancements of security measures and consultations with all those involved before we eventually got sign-off to test the concept.

How has the solution been scaled, particularly as its success has been recognised by parents, medical teams, and hospitals?

The whole thing just exploded in popularity after the pilot. The other units in Glasgow quickly adopted it, and the BBC also ran coverage of it. But the success mainly stemmed from the fantastic team in Glasgow who relentlessly talked about the impact of the technology, including how collaboratively we had worked together and how we had overcome the seemingly impossible governance hurdles.

The popularity was hugely helped by the role of the parents, who were massively engaged with the service. We got amazing feedback from the start and built a real community around it. Over 30,000 people signed up for our newsletter, which led to parents going into units who didn’t have the video service to ask why not.

At that point, we decided as a business to turn it into our sole product. We devised a funding model, as we knew we couldn’t rely on funding purely from the NHS, and went down the route of charity sponsorship. We could put their logo on the platform, direct donations towards them, and give them ongoing impact through their funding. That became a real hit and helped grow the system. 
 
So, we had the product, the model to fund it, and all this incredible community support to help it grow. All that was left was to travel to all the neonatal units in the UK, from Aberdeen to Truro, show them the system and see if they were interested.

You then found another area to pioneer with this technology with epileptic patients. How did that come about?

Following the work with Neil and the team in Glasgow, they introduced us to Professor Sameer Zuberi, a Paediatric Neurologist also based in Glasgow.
 
It’s essential to see a seizure to inform the diagnosis of epilepsy and related conditions. However, this can often be difficult for families to catch in real-time, and when they are, it is difficult to share with medical teams to help inform a diagnosis. 
 
The system we created allowed families to send videos of child seizures so that clinicians can make a quick diagnosis, given that it’s much easier to do this from footage of the seizure as opposed to an explanation from parents. Doing so makes diagnosis faster, preventing unnecessary appointments and investigations and making the whole process much cheaper and more efficient.
 
The next exciting phase is to take this one step further by incorporating AI and machine learning to help triage these videos as soon as they are uploaded. This can then provide support to clinicians in making diagnoses by automatically flagging where more investigation might be needed, such as infantile spasms, which are hard to differentiate from typical baby movements but can lead to lifelong disability if not treated quickly.

What does pioneering on behalf of customers mean to you? Why do organisations find it so hard?

I think organisations find it hard to balance the commercial entity with looking after their customers. For us, the parents were our customers (alongside the clinical team), and what we did was put them first by designing a system with them that was for them. They were always front of mind, and that is what true pioneering is.
 
It’s hard to keep persevering. We were dealing with lots of NHS trusts, who were often working in silos. There was no standardised process for each trust, so we had to continue trying to be as efficient as possible while staying true to addressing our customers’ needs. We had to go through some early pain and heavily refine our process before we got much better at working with different units. It was hard work, but we eventually got there. 

Are there any examples of organisations that you particularly admire for doing something customer-led?

I’ve worked closely with Microsoft for a long time. All our various systems actually work through them. Despite being such a huge organisation, they have a product and service that makes them easy to work with. In our case, they were so receptive to what we were trying to achieve and what technology we needed to make that happen. They offered us lots of tools to provide the platform we were trying to create quickly and efficiently. If it weren’t for them, we would’ve struggled to scale up in the way we have.