Heim Health is an innovation part of the Grow Digital Health Midlands 2026 cohort. We spoke to Elle Clarke, Medical Director at Heim Health. This blog shares insight into their innovation, next steps, their biggest piece of advice innovating in the NHS and their plans for the future. 

 Tell us about the innovation. 
Heim is a software toolkit built specifically for community nursing teams. Most digital systems in the NHS were designed around hospital care, so the teams delivering care in people’s homes have been left to run complex mobile operations on spreadsheets, phone calls and instinct. Heim gives services a live view of demand, capacity and visit status, helps them match the right nurse to the right patient, and automates the non-clinical work that takes nurses away from care.

The technology was built from direct experience. Heim runs its own nursing workforce across the country, and we developed the platform to get our own nurses to the right place at the right time with as little admin as possible. We are now bringing that technology to the NHS.

It matters because the pressures all point the same way. Demand for care at home is growing, more care is moving out of hospital, and the community workforce is stretched. We are live with Procare’s community nursing service, where duty nurses use Heim Find to see
where their teams are and get the nearest nurse to urgent callouts. That is what Heim is for: evidence teams can act on, and time back for patient care.

What are the plans/next steps for this innovation?
Our focus is scale across the NHS. With Procare, we went live earlier this year with live coordination for community nursing and are now expanding into the Companion App, which automates the non-clinical work in a nurse’s day, starting with planning their visits. We are
taking the same approach into more community providers, and I hope to see Heim adopted in every region in England before expanding internationally in the years beyond. We also keep building the product alongside frontline teams. Recent releases, like handling
joint visits properly in scheduling, have come directly from what Procare’s nurses need day to day.

What’s your biggest piece of learning from innovating in the NHS?
Frontline teams already know where the time is going. What they usually lack is the evidence to do something about it. When you put data behind frustrations that have lived in the background for years, making them visible and quantifiable, they turn into sponsored,
funded programmes of work remarkably quickly.

The other lesson is that there is no single door into the NHS. Adoption takes clinical engagement, operational sponsorship and information governance done properly, all at once, and that takes persistence.

What are your hopes for the future?
That every community nurse has technology designed for the job they actually do. We have growing demand, a shift of care from hospital into the community, and a stretched workforce. I want to see how many nurses’ lives we can change, how many people we can keep in the workforce, and how much more care we can deliver at home as a result.

What’s the best part of your job?
Being in the field. We shadow shifts and sit in on allocation as part of every deployment, and the moment a team sees their own working day reflected accurately in the data, often for the first time, is hard to beat. It is also the closest thing to why I went into medicine: making care better for the person receiving it and for the person delivering it.

How do you feel the Grow programme will support you and your innovation?
Heim is at the point where the product is proven with early adopters and the challenge is scale. The Grow programme comes at exactly the right time for that. The expertise, networks and introductions it offers will help us reach more community providers, strengthen our evidence base, and navigate NHS procurement and governance at the pace the system needs.