30% reduction in monthly cloud spend with Google Cloud
10x increase in activity levels following migration
24/7 availability for patient consultations
Real-time automated clinical consultations with Chirp
Over 110,000 patient consultations to date
With scalable infrastructure and advanced AI services from Google Cloud, Ufonia delivers reliable patient consultations 24/7.
With scalable infrastructure and advanced AI services from Google Cloud, Ufonia delivers reliable patient consultations 24/7.
Scaling to meet patient demand with cost-efficient infrastructure
Talking with patients is at the heart of healthcare. However, as populations age and global healthcare demands rise, medical professionals are faced with an ever-increasing workload, limiting their capacity to provide care. This was the challenge Nick de Pennington experienced as a neurosurgeon for Oxford University Hospitals — and the one he set out to solve when he founded Ufonia. By combining AI and clinical expertise to automate routine patient phone consultations, Ufonia is creating what it calls "Artificial Clinical Intelligence." This innovative approach helps hospitals increase capacity for its doctors and nurses, while offering a more convenient, reliable experience for patients.
The key value add was having access to Google Cloud product engineers who can explain the product road map and help us make development decisions. That relationship gave us confidence in Google Cloud as a provider we can trust.
Nick de Pennington
Founder and CEO, Ufonia
As a fast-growing startup, Ufonia's ambitions were constrained by its previous cloud provider. The company's infrastructure was split across multiple environments, with a new one needing to be spun up every time another hospital was added, making its architecture costly and difficult to scale. These high cloud costs meant Ufonia couldn’t offer its AI-powered patient conversations 24/7 and instead had to limit the service to narrow time windows. Ufonia also lacked a direct relationship with its previous cloud provider, making it difficult to understand how to get the most from its products. Ufonia sought a collaborative relationship with a new cloud provider to build a more cost-efficient infrastructure, support the company’s growth, and offer an even better service to patients.
With Google Cloud, Ufonia saw the opportunity to architect its platform for significant savings, which would enable it to scale its services to meet growing patient demand. The company was also impressed with the range of Google Cloud AI solutions, and their potential to help the company build the most effective services for customers.
“The key value add was having access to Google Cloud product engineers who can explain the product road map and help us make development decisions,” explains Nick de Pennington, Founder and CEO, Ufonia. “That relationship gave us confidence in Google Cloud as a provider we can trust.”
Building a scalable and innovative healthcare platform with AI
With the support of Google Cloud partner Searce, Ufonia migrated from its previous provider to a new consolidated infrastructure on Google Cloud, including BigQuery, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Vertex AI. This transition allows the company to auto-scale its resources up and down to meet demand. No longer having to pay for idle capacity enables Ufonia to manage increased demand without incurring exponential costs. As a result, Ufonia has seen a 30% reduction in monthly cloud spend, allowing the company to invest more of its money in research and development. Being able to cost-efficiently and reliably handle demand in this way has allowed Ufonia to complete over 110,000 patient consultations to date.
“Google Cloud has allowed us to scale radically since the migration,” says de Pennington. “We’re now at least 10x the level of activity we were before. Being able to do that without incurring significant costs allows us to keep growing aggressively and extending our investment runway.”
These efficiencies have also created a better experience for patients. With the improved flexibility and reliability of the platform, Ufonia can now offer its services all day, every day, allowing patients to choose appointment times that work for them, such as evenings and weekends, with more than 40% of patients now choosing to do so.
Integral to Ufonia's “Artificial Clinical Intelligence” platform are Google Cloud AI services. With Chirp, Google Cloud’s foundation model for speech-to-text, Ufonia turns patient phone conversations into text for clinical analysis, before converting the text back to speech in near real time. Ufonia works closely with Google Cloud’s product engineers to continuously optimize its systems and fine-tune the streaming and confidence levels of the transcription to ensure patients experience a smooth and natural conversation.
Google Cloud has allowed us to scale radically since the migration. We’re now at least 10x the level of activity we were before. Being able to do that without incurring significant costs allows us to keep growing aggressively and extending our investment runway.
Nick de Pennington
Founder and CEO, Ufonia
“Automated voice conversations with patients are the core of what we do, and the speech-to-text models from Google Cloud provide the best performance, making them an integral part of our service,” de Pennington explains. “By working together with the Google Cloud team we are able to automate these conversations at incredibly low latency with incredibly high reliability.”
Meanwhile, Ufonia uses Gemini for document understanding and information extraction. Clinical documents, which can contain both structured and unstructured data, are often received from other health providers in various formats. With Gemini, Ufonia automates the extraction of key information, removing a manual, time-consuming task and ensuring patients can be scheduled for their first interaction within 48 hours.
Ufonia also uses Vertex AI as a dedicated environment for its research and development and clinical validation work, including using the Gemini family of models to evaluate and test its conversational AI agent. As a regulated medical device company, Ufonia must ensure the safety and effectiveness of its AI systems. To achieve this, its science team has developed a sophisticated “agent as a judge” framework, where one AI model is used to evaluate the performance of another. This allows Ufonia to rigorously test new large language models and other AI systems to ensure they meet strict safety standards before being used by patients. This benchmarking has shown Gemini Pro and Gemini Flash to be best in class in a number of areas, including critical failure modes and multimodal evaluations. Through this continuous evaluation process, enabled by Google Cloud, Ufonia can confidently build a trusted and reliable clinical platform.
Transforming tomorrow’s healthcare, today
With a scalable, cost-efficient platform on Google Cloud, Ufonia now has the confidence to pursue ambitious growth. The company is preparing for significant expansion in the UK, with patient activity on its platform expected to quadruple in the coming years, and it’s also launching trials in the U.S.
For de Pennington, being able to rely on Google Cloud to provide scalable infrastructure and cutting-edge AI services means the company can focus on what it does best: transforming healthcare with better experiences for patients and healthcare providers alike.
"Our cloud provider’s our most important supplier, so having a strong relationship is crucial,” says de Pennington. “We also need to know that the supplier can support our evolution. With Google Cloud we have both the relationship and the technology to support our growth long into the future.”
Our cloud provider’s our most important supplier, so having a strong relationship is crucial. We also need to know that the supplier can support our evolution. With Google Cloud we have both the relationship and the technology to support our growth long into the future.
Nick de Pennington
Founder and CEO, Ufonia
Ufonia combines AI and clinical evidence to automate routine clinical conversations, making care more convenient, reliable, and consistent for patients, while increasing hospitals’ capacity.
Industry: Healthcare and Life Sciences
Location: UK
Products: Google Cloud, BigQuery, Chirp, Gemini, Google Kubernetes Engine, Vertex AI
About Google Cloud partner — Searce
Searce is a modern technology consulting firm that empowers clients to modernize and future-proof their businesses, leveraging cloud, AI, and analytics.
