Sonia Neary, founder and CEO of Wellola. Image: Emily Quinn
The Dublin-based start-up’s flagship product is a patient care and communication platform called Portasana that is used by clinical teams across Ireland and the UK.
It has been a good week for Sonia Neary and her digital health start-up Wellola. Riding on a wave of demand for healthcare services in general – and those that reduce hospital overcrowding in particular – the company raised €2.2m in funding last week.
Neary founded Wellola in 2016 with a defined goal: to make the future of healthcare more preventative, community-based and digital.
Since then, the company has been making steady growth in clients across the UK and Ireland with hospitals under both the NHS (National Health Service) and HSE (Health Service Executive) using its platforms that make the lives of clinicians and patients easier.
From physiotherapist to entrepreneur
A chartered physiotherapist by background, Neary had worked in clinical practice for 15 years prior to founding her own company. While in her role, she was able to gain unique insights into the needs of patients and practitioners in today’s digital age.
“I trained at both Trinity College Dublin and DIT (now part of TU Dublin) and have lived and worked in the US and Asia at different points in my career. I developed my commercial and operational skills via entrepreneurship programmes supported or run largely by Enterprise Ireland,” she says. “I became a big believer in leveraging digital technology to support hospital-at-home and self-management care models.”
Wellola’s key offering is a patient care and communication platform called Portasana that is used by public and private hospitals in both Ireland and across the UK, including Leeds, Birmingham and London. In fact, last week’s funding led by Elkstone is poised to help the start-up further expand in the market.
“Portasana offers comprehensive capabilities, ranging from real-time health data monitoring to personalised education about specific conditions, enabling informed decision-making in healthcare management,” Neary explains.
“Where Wellola goes a step further is that our platform fully integrates with core clinical systems in the hospital setting; patients can efficiently track their health parameters and engage with healthcare professionals without necessitating frequent in-person visits, thereby optimising their healthcare journey and minimising unnecessary disruptions.”
Giving clinical teams their hours back
Neary said that Portasana can be integrated with core NHS systems and patient records. Hospital staff can also curate an “unlimited” amount of evidence-based digital care pathways for their patients across all services, reducing the need for follow-up appointments.
“The beauty of the product is it’s quick to set up, low-code, hardware-light and supports patients to self-manage, only presenting for face-to-face care where absolutely necessary, reducing costs and returning time to care for clinical sites,” she goes on.
“Of note, Wellola has a library of pre-curated content that clinical sites can avail of as they require – for example, a library of courses and videos to address population health concerns such as smoking cessation, management of diabetes and COPD – or sites can curate their own.”
The goal, according to Neary, is to support as many patients to self-manage their care and give back as many hours to clinical teams as is “as is humanly possible”, offering healthcare organisations cost savings at scale. And things have been going well to that end.
“Demand for healthcare services has never been higher and we’re hearing from our customers that tackling the elective backlog to free up capacity for more patients is a top priority. The way Wellola digitises administrative tasks and clinical pathways allows healthcare organisations to do just this,” she says.
“Our team is made up of 21 people at the moment and our recent funding means we can expand on this number, with the aim to hire more people across our technical and operational teams in the next year.”
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