Invatech Health has secured an award of £900,000 from Innovate UK for its cutting-edge pharmacy software Titan.
The latest round of funding takes the total amount the Bristol-based firm received under a competitive programme to support SME innovations to £2.2 million.
“Innovate UK is pleased to support Invatech Health in its important and highly innovative development of Titan PMR for the pharmacy sector,” commented Nigel Walker, deputy director at Innovate UK, which is part of the national funding agency UK Research and Innovation.
“The business has met all the objectives established during the first phase of the loan arrangement and we are delighted to provide further funding to support the company’s ongoing innovations.”
Invatech received an initial loan in February 2018 for the development of Titan, which is complemented by further grant funding during the Covid-19 pandemic to support remote working for independent pharmacists.
Tariq Muhammad, chief executive of Invatech Health, said the latest funding will support the development of new features for the company’s leading platform.
“With this additional support from Innovate UK we plan to develop a wide range of new game-changing apps, delivered as extensions on the Titan platform,” he said. “These will help address the new and immediate challenges that pharmacies are facing as a result of Covid-19 and provide innovative solutions to support their businesses and their patients in the long term.”
Muhammad added that the pandemic has shone light on the shortcomings of old technology across the sector, among large online businesses and small independents alike.
“This crisis has highlighted the incapacity of legacy systems to scale up and adapt to dynamic situations, in many business sectors,” he commented.
“The pandemic has put pharmacies are under significant pressure and there is a need for technology that can help them cope with greater volume of work, as well as releasing pharmacists time to spend on frontline healthcare.”
A cloud-based solution, Titan digitises the end-to-end workflow within pharmacies, makes medicine dispensing safer using barcode technology, helps control business activities and improves the experience for patients and practice owners alike, freeing up pharmacists’ time in the process to help them focus on newly-commissioned patient services designed to relieve the burden from under-pressure GPs and the wider NHS.
The solution became the first pharmacy Patient Medication Record (PMR) to get accredited by NHS in one and a half decade, and since the feat in late 2019, it has cornered two per cent market share, processing over 1.5 million prescriptions per month.
The technology has also become the platform of choice for some of the largest UK online pharmacies which have leveraged its highly scalable cloud infrastructure to process mass volumes and, in some cases, over 60,000 prescriptions per day.
“We’re delighted with the progress that Titan has made, commercially and operationally, over the past two years. We have taken an idea and built something which is helping independent pharmacy businesses and large scale operators alike,” Muhammad said.
“With 5,000 independent and small group pharmacists in England and Wales, alongside the larger corporates, the commercial potential for Titan is massive. We’re fundamentally different to all other PMRs and are offering a new way of life for pharmacists and a new way of doing things.”
