Our investment in Echo

“I’m British, I know how to queue” says Arthur Dent in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It seems that Brits are renowned globally (or even galaxy wide) for their ability to queue; and the undisputed gold standard of British queuing is the Wimbledon queue.

But not all queues are created equal. Beyond the manicured lawns of Wimbledon, queuing is one of the nation’s most tedious tasks; when surveyed 44% say that queuing is worse than washing up. The average Brit spends five hours and 35 minutes in queues each month, with post offices, supermarkets and pharmacies among the most significant contributors. Over a year, that’s almost three days of waiting. Take pharmacies: for some the process of handing over a paper prescription and then waiting to have it filled, is a valuable experience. Some may have developed trusted relationships with their pharmacists, while others simply value the face-to-face contact of a community pharmacy. For these individuals, the time spent in a pharmacy adds to the experience of taking medication. For everyone else, there’s Echo.

The Echo app makes life easier for people on long-term medication by removing the hassle of repeat prescription management. Users make requests via the app which are sent to their existing NHS GP for approval. Once approved, prescriptions are sent to Echo’s partner pharmacies for dispensing, and dispatched by Royal Mail. For Echo there’s no time spent waiting at a pharmacy. A fifth of full time workers run out of their regular medication due to hectic lifestyles. By bringing medication from high-street pharmacies to your door mat, Echo provides a solution.

More importantly, Echo goes beyond taking the existing pharmacy approach and putting it on mobile. Like all of the best healthtech, it leverages technology to deliver better patient healthcare outcomes. We all know that successful treatment requires you to take medication as prescribed. But very often doses are skipped and medication is left in a cupboard gathering dust. Through medication reminders, Echo nudges people towards better health — and at the same time helps the NHS reduce their £300 million annual spend on wasted medicine.