The Concentric Chronicle: Winter 2025

Why were the elves happy that the hospital switched to Concentric?

- More paper left over for wrapping clinicians’ presents! 🫣

Welcome to the second edition of The Concentric Chronicle, our newsletter where we share product developments, learnings and tales from our community, plus updates on what we’ve been up to (including a few shameless plugs for recent successes).

As we wrap up the year, this bumper Christmas edition includes:

• Scrubbing up: Visits to Hillingdon and St Mary’s
• HIN evaluation explores Concentric’s impact
• A sneak peek at Concentric illustrations
• The Welsh Double at the Awards!
• Away week on the Isle of Wight
• Feature spotlight: Custom template sharing

Scrubbing up: Visits to Hillingdon and St Mary’s

In October, we visited two of Concentric’s new deployments: Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and the Isle of Wight NHS Trust.

Hillingdon went live with Concentric in May as a ‘big-bang’ go-live alongside neighbours London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust. The team has driven one of the fastest implementations to date, rolling out across the specialties and reaching 600 consent episodes per week within Concentric in 4 weeks. Huge congratulations!

Front-end Engineer Andrew and Clinical Operations Lead Chloé joined Hillingdon’s Consent Lead and Consultant Obstetrician Paula Galea to present Concentric updates in departmental meetings before donning scrubs to follow the consent process through theatres. Witnessing Concentric in action and speaking with the people who use it always sparks plenty of ideas for improvements, both big and small!

While visiting the Isle of Wight for the Concentric away week, we couldn’t miss the opportunity to drop in on the team at St Mary’s Hospital. Chloé was joined by a new face on the Concentric team, Research & Innovation Associate Isabelle. They met with the digital transformation team and the radiology department before sitting in on a general surgery consent clinic. It was a privilege to hear first-hand insights from users and a great chance to share tips and tricks to help them make the most of the application.

HIN evaluation explores Concentric’s impact

As the UK reaches the milestone of 50% of NHS trusts having at least started the process of implementing digital consent, Brogan (Ontology Clinician) took the opportunity to critically review an independent evaluation published recently by Health Innovation Oxford & Thames Valley (HIOTV) assessing the impact of digital consent across two NHS trusts.

The 74-page report, funded by NHS England, takes a detailed look at Concentric’s rollout at Oxford University Hospital (OUH) and Buckinghamshire Healthcare (BHT). But what does it tell us? In short, the report strengthens the evidence for digital consent’s efficiency, documentation quality and cost benefits, while also highlighting areas that need deeper exploration. Read Brogan’s full critique of the HIOTV digital consent evaluation.

A sneak peek at Concentric illustrations

As the old adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words – and we couldn’t agree more. That’s why we were excited to welcome Terouz, a plastic surgery resident and medical illustrator, who joined the team to develop a portfolio of Concentric illustrations.

Terouz’s visuals are designed to complement and enhance the information already within Concentric, supporting the consent conversation and patient understanding. They range from anatomical drawings showing the intricate before-and-after of hand surgery to visuals of the equipment and room setup for an endoscopy, and everything in between.

The illustrations aren’t available in Concentric just yet, but to get a feel for the work and what’s to come in early 2026, take a look at Terouz’s video. We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback as we develop the portfolio!

The Welsh Double at the Awards! 🏆

It’s been a fortnight of awards, taking home what we’re calling the ‘Welsh Healthtech Double’: Best Healthtech at the Wales Tech Awards at the end of November, followed a week later by Best Partnership with the NHS at the Mediwales Innovation Awards.

Take a look at the glitzy Wales Tech ceremony in this clip of Daf receiving Best Healthtech. On stage, we shared our news of passing 2 million patient users, and how proud we are to reach such milestones as a Welsh business.

A week later, the Loughran brothers - Martyn and Daf - took to the stage together to receive the Partnership with the NHS award, recognising our rapid deployment across the NHS and close collaboration with many of those organisations as the product and business have matured.

Away week on the Isle of Wight

As a remote-first team, our latest in-person get-together took us across the Solent for a few days on the Isle of Wight. It was a chance to work together on some company-wide topics and visit St Mary’s Hospital, but also to fit in:

• A clean sweep for the founders at go-karting (remind us to pick a different activity next time…),
• A windy visit to The Needles – despite the name, the rocks are not at all needle-like; fun fact, the rock formation was named after a fourth needle-shaped pillar that is no longer visible. It collapsed in a storm… in 1764, and
• An evening recital from our very own cellist, CTO Martyn!

A lovely week on the island, and as always, great to spend time together.

Feature spotlight: Custom template sharing

Our September release introduced a much-requested update to custom templates: sharing. Clinicians can now easily share their custom templates with colleagues across their healthcare organisation, helping teams stay consistent while still benefiting from the flexibility of custom templates.

Sharing is simple: create or open a template, select Share, and copy the link for a colleague to add it to their list. For full details, explore our custom templates guide.

Other recent release highlights include: auto-selection of registry additional consents, simpler support for patients struggling to log in, updated mental capacity assessment aligned with the revised MCA Code of Practice, and integration with Semble’s patient management system. Read more in our release notes.

Meet our newest team members 👋

We’re delighted to welcome two new members to the Concentric team, meet Bimpé and Isabelle! In August we welcomed Isabelle Roach, who joins as our Research and Innovation Associate bolstering our evidence generation capabilities as well as carrying out research to inform future product developments that will deliver greater value to patients and clinicians. Joining the team this month is our newest team member, Clinical Operations Coordinator Bimpé Lawal. She is the other half of a busy operational function, bringing much-needed reinforcements and adding another pair of capable hands to support our partner organisations at every step of deployment and rollout. We’re excited to have you both on board, Bimpé and Isabelle!

Call for research projects

Do you have a great idea for a research project looking into digital consent? Whether you’ve got a fully fleshed-out plan or just the beginnings of an idea, our research and innovation team is here to help. Find out more about the support we offer.

For your ears and eyes 🎧

• Patrick took to the mic on the Talking Healthtech podcast – the leading digital health podcast in Australia – to discuss how the opportunities for digital consent to transform patient care, and what this might look like in Australia.
• Co-founder and Chief Medical Officer, Ed, was a peer reviewer for a recently published paper exploring the perceptions, practices and barriers around informed consent in Sudan. It offers an insightful look at how patients and clinicians navigate consent in a resource-poor setting and highlights challenges that resonate far beyond the local context.