Cera, Europe’s largest HealthTech, today announces the launch of the world’s first dedicated AI Lab for the care sector. The initiative aims to address the global care capacity crisis by rapidly building, proving, and licensing high-impact AI tools to transform health systems, solving productivity and accessibility challenges internationally.
Across the world, ageing populations are increasing demand for care while workforce challenges, weak retention, and unaffordable access are limiting supply, creating a growing care gap. Healthcare systems globally are in urgent need of innovation, with 1 in 4 older people experiencing unmet needs for long-term care, and with just 1 in 3 reporting countries able to meet the long-term care needs of older people.
Cera’s new AI Lab aims to solve this capacity crisis – building on Cera’s existing technology stack, from robotics and AI agents, to preventative AI algorithms which identify health risks with over 80% accuracy, halving avoidable hospital admissions. A third-party report published last year showed these tools have already saved the UK Government over £1 billion ($1.3 billion) to date.
The AI Lab will draw on Cera’s world-leading dataset of over 300 billion highly secure, anonymised patient health insights, gathered by over 10,000 carers and nurses across 2.5 million patient home visits monthly, to develop cutting-edge new AI tools. Cera has hired a team of ‘Entrepreneurs in Residence’ to work with its AI pioneers, data scientists and clinical leaders to identify key productivity and accessibility bottlenecks on the frontline of care, and draw on Cera’s dataset to develop tools to solve them at pace.
Through Cera’s AI Lab, these experts will build, rigorously evaluate, and then deploy AI solutions into the homes of real patients, continuously assessing their impact. Cera has partnerships with two-thirds of NHS care regions and over 100 UK Local Governments, so is able to roll out these new tools both at speed and at scale, building a vast real-world evidence-base to show they work safely. Once proven on the frontline, Cera will license these AI tools to healthcare providers globally.
Our AI Lab will not build companies – the focus will be on building transformational products – but we will be open to working with external collaborators. Our Entrepreneurs in Residence will be incentivised on an equity model. We already have the first cohort in place and will be open to recruiting more Entrepreneurs in Residence to help us develop even more AI tools.
Dr Ben Maruthappu MBE, Founder & CEO of Cera, said: “As the population ages, healthcare systems globally are drowning in demand. The critical way to solve this crisis is by using technology – from AI algorithms to robotics – to empower healthcare workers to achieve more with less. People often fear that technology will replace empathy, but to save human care, we must automate everything but the human.
“Ultimately, given the severe workforce challenges across the sector, the alternative to AI & robotics isn’t human care. For millions right now, the alternative is no care at all. By proving this technology works at a national scale in the UK, we are creating a blueprint that can be exported globally through our AI Lab, to fix broken healthcare systems worldwide, keeping patients out of hospital and in the comfort of their own homes.”
The UK Government has publicly supported the launch, highlighting its potential to drive growth through technology exports, as well as strengthening healthcare systems worldwide.
Kanishka Narayan, UK AI Minister at the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology, said: “Cera’s world-first lab will put precious time back in the hands of healthcare workers, so they can focus on delivering the care people depend on. It is proof that AI can power the transformation of NHS and healthcare systems around the world.
“It builds on our rollout of other practical time-saving tech like ambient voice technology, freeing up clinicians from tedious note-taking, and deploying AI diagnostic tools that spot diseases like lung cancer in record time.”
Cera’s AI Lab will build on high-impact tools Cera is already licensing across the care sector, including:
- Predictive prevention: AI algorithms that predict health risks with over 80% accuracy, reducing falls by 20% and halving avoidable hospitalisations.
- Workforce expansion: AI Recruitment Agents that double hiring volumes, while halving the time to hire, and AI Retention Agents that intervene 7x faster than human teams to prevent staff burnout.
- Home Care Robots: Cera’s Care Robots, which increase provider capacity by 20% and productivity by up to 80% by supporting older people with nutrition and medication reminders.
Cera is Europe’s largest HealthTech, and is the only company in the world combining at-scale home care delivery with in-house data and AI development capability, as well as its own robotics arm. This means it is uniquely positioned to build, prove and license new AI products that drive rapid results for providers globally – leading the care sector into the future.
Dr Ben Maruthappu MBE, Founder & CEO, Cera