Pitchfest 2022 winner CardMedic secures £411k Innovate UK grant

Digital Health Pitchfest winner CardMedic has secured £411,000 in funding from Innovate UK’s SMART grant programme for its frontline healthcare language app.

The grant will fund a 12-month project, running from April 2025 to March 2026, to scale and integrate a portal aimed at transforming how healthcare organisations deliver language services.

CardMedic, which was crowned Rewired Pitchfest champion in 2022, will improve its existing solution to create an AI-enhanced end-to-end language service provision system which enables immediate access to healthcare content.

Tim Grimaldi, cofounder and managing director of CardMedic, said: “This funding enables us to realise our long-term vision of making healthcare communication even more accessible and efficient.

“At a time when the NHS is focused on driving productivity and improving patient care, our solution offers innovative ways to deliver high quality language services quickly, efficiently and where they were previously unavailable.

“We’re creating an innovative solution that will further transform how language services are delivered across the NHS.

“This will not only improve accessibility but also create a more efficient and cost-effective system that benefits patients, healthcare providers and language service providers alike.”

The project will lead to improved speed and accessibility features for the CardMedic frontline app, including streamlined navigation for people with English as a second or third language and enhanced performance for NHS integration.

This will include on-demand personalised interpreter services from translation and interpretation providers.

Other improvements include adjustable content sizes for people with visual impairments, offline, device agnostic use and optimised landscape viewing enabling patients to better understand diagnostics and treatment.

CardMedic Connect will be the company’s new portal to allow healthcare providers to serve patients more effectively.

It will provide access to thousands of pre-translated clinical interactions currently available via the CardMedic Frontline app, plus speedier access to real-time interpreter and language services.

The integration of AI technology will also boost CardMedic’s medical communication database, which the company said in a press release will create “a comprehensive and specialised resource”.

This latest funding follows CardMedic’s recent £499,683 award from SBRI Healthcare to help develop an AI-enabled language portal.

The 12-month project aims to improve access to real-time language support at the point of care within NHS urgent and emergency care settings, which will in turn help improve patient safety and tackle health inequality.

The SBRI Healthcare funding will support the company with the technical development of the CardMedic Connect portal, as well as patient engagement initiatives and clinical validation.

Together, the national funding awards totalling almost £1 million are expected to accelerate CardMedic’s mission to improve healthcare communication and health equity across UK and US healthcare systems.

Meanwhile, NHS England has raised concerns that the inappropriate use of AI translation apps in healthcare could cause risks to patient safety.

The ‘Improvement framework: community language translation and interpreting services’, published by NHSE on 27 May 2025, highlights “concerns about the appropriate use of AI translation apps that are currently widely used across the NHS” to communicate with patients with limited English.