Solving the last mile of healthcare delivery: Why we're backing Heim Health
Across the UK, a quiet but profound revolution is reshaping how care is delivered.
Traditional healthcare systems, built around hospitals and clinics, are buckling under the weight of workforce shortages, endless wait times, overburdened practitioners and burnout at all-time highs. Hiring more staff and building more capacity within this model is necessary, but slow. While virtual care is lifting some of the burden, over 70% of healthcare decisions still require in-person assessments.
But the future of healthcare isn’t restricted by hospital corridors or clinic walls—it’s embedded in our communities. There is huge potential in bringing diagnostics closer to patients, empowering healthcare professionals to work flexibly and efficiently, and leveraging technology to cut through inefficiency. This is exactly what Heim Health is unlocking.
Bringing health home Heim
Heim Health is revolutionising care by enabling in-person clinical services to be delivered directly in patients’ homes. With a remote-first approach, Heim manages the end-to-end delivery of at-home patient appointments both for private providers and the NHS. Through their API-led platform, Heim matches nurses, phlebotomists and other healthcare practitioners (HCPs) to at-home diagnostic care and health checks, making healthcare more scalable, efficient, and patient-centred.
Behind the scenes, Heim abstracts away the complexity of matching healthcare practitioners (HCPs) with the right tasks by focusing on three elements:
Unlocking untapped workforces: Although significant parts of the health system are facing workforce crises, Heim can surface other areas where, surprisingly, there is actually evidence of underutilisation. While some clinical environments can trigger burnout, driving talent out of the system, at-home appointments allow retired, part-time and locum practitioners seeking flexible hours to rejoin or remain in the system by fulfilling before/after work appointments outside their regular shifts. Heim have proven this source to be hugely untapped and have already derisked practitioner availability as a bottleneck.Â
Optimising skillsets & cost for clinical need: For many marketplaces (e.g. delivery platforms), labour supply is homogenous. But in health, skillsets and tasks are heterogenous: Heim’s platform not only ensures that practitioners with the right skill sets—such as phlebotomists, nurses, or healthcare assistants—are matched to jobs with specific requirements, but also minimises cases where more costly practitioners are matched to tasks for which they’re overqualified. This decreases redundancies and frees up resource to be deployed elsewhere in the system.
Logistics & routing efficiencies: The platform uses ‘last mile’ delivery-inspired algorithms to optimise the practitioner’s route and schedule, reducing time spent on the road and enabling more patients to be seen within a shift. AI-powered scheduling and route optimisation create up to 30% more capacity within the same pool of practitioners, unlocking untapped potential in the workforce.
In the UK, the new approach Heim brings to market is driven by necessity and bolstered by policy. The new Secretary of State of Health and Social Care, Wes Streeting, has emphasised the need to shift care out of hospitals and into the community, with the NHS Long Term Plan and Long Term Workforce Plan delivering on this. Rapid response teams, Community Diagnostic Centres, virtual wards, and point-of-care testing all pave the way for a new era of healthcare—and Heim Health is poised to lead this shift.
Meet the team
We have been speaking to Heim Health founder Kelly Klifa since May 2023, when Heim was just getting started. She struck us then as she does now: grounded, self-aware, focused, and methodical, with an undeniable sense of grit. Together with James Monico, Kelly previously co-founded Testing for All, the UK’s only not-for-profit COVID testing service to emerge during the pandemic, generating tens of millions in revenue and delivering more than 1 million at-home tests. Before that, James founded and sold Cloudreach, the cloud software enablement platform, to Blackstone in 2017.
Kelly and James have now teamed up with Sasha Tory, a senior health sales leader from the US, where she was formerly Head of Partnerships at Qured, a preventative health screening platform for employers, to drive Heim Health to international scale.
We see huge potential in Heim to build the software layer for distributed healthcare, as the market transitions away from its heavy reliance on in-clinic/hospital care. The team have already proven they can scale in-person healthcare tech quickly and we’re thrilled to be part of their journey.
Kelly Klifa, Heim Co-founder & CEO:
Form Ventures has proven to be an invaluable partner in our journey at Heim, bringing far more than just capital to the table. Their deep expertise in healthcare policy and regulatory frameworks has been instrumental in helping us navigate an increasingly complex landscape.
What sets them apart further is their holistic approach to venture building—they understand that success isn’t just about the numbers and strategy but also about the human elements of scaling a venture. Their ability to combine sharp business acumen with genuine empathy has made them a truly trusted partner.
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