Healthlinx

Lucy Swain, Healthlinx Founder

About the Project

Healthlinx is a digital health system designed to meet the needs of patients and practitioners who are keen to embrace a new paradigm of healthcare.

Healthlinx aims to:

  1. Prioritise patient autonomy and self-managed healthcare.
  2. Ensure equal opportunities for all practitioners who wish to demonstrate their expertise in personalised healthcare.
  3. Harness the power of digital technology to collate large-scale data across multiple disciplines and sectors, from which to steer future research and cost-effective healthcare practice.
  4. Value both the art and science of promoting health, wellbeing and resilience (salutogenesis)  in order to reduce the need for the control and suppression of disease (pathogenesis).

Healthlinx has been developed by Lucy Swain, a health practitioner with over 30 years of experience working in the NHS and in private healthcare, in both mainstream and complementary medicine.

Lucy qualified as a Speech & Language Therapist in 1990 and spent 22 years working in hospital and community settings in the NHS.

In 2013, she set up her own private Speech & Language Therapy practice, whilst studying for the next 10 years to gain 3 further qualifications in Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine.

During this time, Lucy worked with patients who were often trying to manage their symptoms using a variety of interventions, such as medications, therapies, exercise, nutrition and social, emotional or spiritual pursuits. Many patients complained that they were unable to make sense of all the different recommendations and felt disempowered in the management of their health.

It was also noticeable that the dichotomy between public and private healthcare, and also between medical and non-medical treatments, was preventing patients from receiving a co-ordinated and personalised approach to their care. In addition, valuable comparative data about the efficacy of different interventions across both sectors is currently being lost, leading to disorganised healthcare delivery and an inefficient use of resources.

As a result, Healthlinx was created to meet the needs of patients, practitioners, researchers and health organisations:

The Patient  Healthlinx provides a single platform where the individual can choose to engage with practitioners from both public and private sectors, and view meaningful correlations about how various interventions are affecting their clinical signs and symptoms.

The Practitioner  Healthlinx offers the potential to collate data from a wide range of patients and practitioners on one platform. This data can be used to identify successful interventions, highlight areas for further research and demonstrate the efficacy of individual practitioners or professions.

The Researcher   Data collection from patients and practitioners across multiple sectors and disciplines offers the potential to identify new trends from which to direct future research projects.

The Health Organisation  The potential to compare medical and non-medical interventions across multiple sectors offers the ability to identify successful cost-effective interventions and highlight inefficiencies in healthcare delivery that can be resolved.