Digital patient consent leader Concentric may expand its footprint into Ireland, says founder and CEO Dafydd Loughran.

Dr Loughran said Concentric was having “early-stage conversations” in Ireland, with two Dublin hospitals preparing pilot deployments.

Concentric digitises the consent process end-to-end, embedding high-quality clinical content and facilitating shared decision-making well before the day of surgery.  Patients consider the information in their own time,  and give consent in person or remotely. 

The consent application is used by 35 NHS trusts across the UK, and  supports around 1.5 million patient consents annually.

International expansion

With momentum strong in the UK, Concentric is now eyeing international expansion. Dr Loughran was in Australia this month, supported by the Welsh Government, to explore the local healthcare landscape.

“We’re seeing the same themes here — paper consent forms alongside EMRs, the same inefficiencies. It’s definitely interesting how global these themes are,” Dr Loughlan told Pulse+IT.

His visit included meetings with clinicians in both Sydney and Melbourne, as well as attendance at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (RACS) Congress.

As a Welsh native with Irish family roots, Loughran sees the company’s international growth as both a personal and professional mission.

Curiosity fosters the business

Dr Loughran didn’t set out to be the leader of a fast-growing health tech company.

He began his career as a surgical trainee in the UK.

“I remember that first Wednesday morning on my orthopaedic rotation,” Loughran recalls. “I’d done two weeks of orthopaedics in med school and suddenly I had to get a patient to sign a consent form for a tibial IM nail (surgery). I didn’t even know what that was.”

“So I basically started writing an aid memoir, a resource of information for my own use, on the wards, before going and having these conversations with patients.

“There was no plan for it to be a business. It was just totally organic,” he says. “But I was curious what it could be.”

Curiosity led Loughran through a leadership fellowship and into a role at Babylon Health.

The turning point came with a grant of £500,000 from Innovate UK in 2019. By March 2020, Concentric Health was in clinical use at Imperial College London.

The start-up set out to solve a very specific but widespread problem: consent forms, often one of the last remaining paper processes in hospitals, were being lost or mishandled — even in facilities with state-of-the-art electronic medical records (EMRs).

“We could see lots of places introducing electronic medical records across the world, but this pattern kept emerging where they would introduce an EMR and then you’d have a few remaining paper processes, of which consent forms were almost always one of them,” he said.

“We were seeing places where they were losing about one in four consent forms,” Dr Loughran says. “As hospitals became more digital, the robustness of paper-based processes was falling apart.”

Shared decision-making

Dr Loughran said he believed real innovation lay in fostering meaningful conversations between patients and clinicians.

“Shared decision-making is about two experts in the room — the clinician and the patient,” said Dr Loughran. “We’ve moved from just 28% to 72% of patients reporting gold standard shared decision-making.”

Clinical benefits include a 5% reduction in day-of-surgery delays and cancellations, driven by the ability to initiate consent earlier — even remotely — using digital tools.

“You don’t always need a clinic appointment,” he said. “A registrar can call a patient or send them the information to review ahead of time, using those small gaps in their schedule.”

The results are not only clinical but financial. In most cases, the switch to Concentric proves cost-saving from year one, he said.