Ben Maruthappu is a London-based doctor and CEO of Cera, a multi-award winning digital-first home healthcare company, which has grown 100-fold in the past three years, now delivering over 50,000 patient appointments a day.  He formerly advised the CEO of NHS England on technology, co-founding the NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA) which has benefitted over three million people.

Can you tell us more about Cera and how it has evolved over the past few years to become a leading digital-first home healthcare company? 

Cera is Europe’s largest provider of digital-first home healthcare, delivering care, nursing, telehealth and repeat prescriptions, and we develop and deploy software to deliver these services more efficiently, and to improve health outcomes for clients. 

I co-founded Cera in 2016, after going through the experience of organising care for my own mother. I knew the industry could be improved and elevated through technology, and soon after Cera was born. 

In just over five years, Cera has expanded to more than 10,000 employees delivering 50,000 home care visits every day, with annualised revenues of more than $250 million. Cera currently holds 300+ partnerships with the NHS and local authorities, and the company’s technology is used by 2,000+ businesses nationwide. 

As someone with a background in medicine, how did you make the transition to becoming an entrepreneur? What sparked the leap? 

As part of my degree studying medicine I spent time on the East Coast USA where there was a huge sense of entrepreneurship. The culture around building companies and innovation was completely different to anything I had experienced during my past in the UK, everyone had some form of project or company they were building which was incredibly inspiring. I caught the bug and immediately knew that I wanted to build something myself. 

I came back to the UK, practised as a doctor, and was fortunate enough to become advisor to the CEO of the NHS on innovation technology and built a number of national programs focusing on that which gave me a great insight into what technologies can make a big difference in healthcare. 

Can you share some of the key challenges you faced in scaling Cera to deliver over 50,000 patient appointments a day, and how you overcame them? 

An example of the challenges that Cera faced was at the start of COVID19, and how it was turned into an opportunity to make a massive impact on people’s lives all through innovation and technology being used at pace in an agile manner. 

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was forced to turn this unprecedented challenge into an opportunity. The country, the globe, the sector, went into survival mode - with an economic crisis where an unprecedented number of people became unemployed, and a care crisis where there were unprecedented demands for healthcare. At Cera, we saw it as an opportunity to play our part in helping the wider community. On the one hand, we offered jobs to the people impacted by lockdown-impacted job losses, such as hospitality and tourism, so they could have a regular income and a fulfilling new career in care, assisted by Cera’s training technology that allowed them to be retrained and deployed in care in record time. 

At the same time we used these new employees to help address the care crisis, and the serious pressures the NHS was facing. In March 2020, we set the ambition for Cera to recruit and train 10,000 people to work in care at Cera, later accomplishing this goal during 2021, with Cera also delivering over 20 million home care visits during the pandemic to support the oldest and most vulnerable in society. 

How did your experience advising the CEO of NHS England and co-founding the NHS Innovation Accelerator inform your approach to launching Cera? 

Co-founding the NHS Innovation Accelerator helped me understand where technology can be most impactful in healthcare, and what business models are most effective. There are over 300,000 Apps focused on health and wellbeing in the App store but only a fraction are adopted and solve key challenges the NHS is facing. This experience helped me to focus on home care, where the provision of services is particularly outdated with limited digital adoption, and technology can make a real difference, empowering staff to focus more on care and less on paperwork, ultimately creating a better service that also supports the NHS by keeping patients out of hospital and in their own home, where they prefer to be. 

Why digital-first healthcare, and what potential benefits do you see this approach offering patients and healthcare providers? 

I knew that I wanted to focus on care in the home and use technology to make it better to get the right care in the right place, and give carers an app so they have all the information at their fingertips. 

More generally, it was clear to me when we founded Cera that healthcare would eventually move from hospital to home, as it’s far more affordable, convenient and results in better patient outcomes. This is somewhat similar to many other sectors, where services have moved from central physical locations, to being delivered at customers' doorsteps, all accessible via smartphone - such as with retail banks and fintech, eCommerce, and even grocery delivery services. 

How do you see technology continuing to shape the healthcare industry by 2050? 

Providing more healthcare at home is seen as essential to the future of the NHS and healthcare. This is definitely the direction of travel. At Cera we need to see 75% of healthcare services move into the home or community by 2030, to provide a sustainable future for the NHS as we know it. 

We also believe that AI technology is going to be vastly more common in many parts of our lives. For healthcare providers it’s those who have the data that make the biggest difference, and this is where our focus lies to shape the healthcare industry.

Can you speak to your role on the Board of North West London NHS Integrated Care System, and how this informs your work at Cera? 

It gives a broader view of the health and care system; how the different parts fit together; I am a big believer in the NHS and so enjoy supporting it through different roles. 

With over 100 peer-reviewed publications and 75 awards to your name, how do you balance your research and academic work with your current responsibilities as a CEO? 

Having a brilliant team at Cera supports me both in having better work-life balance, but also in allowing me to contribute to healthcare in different ways. Even during the pandemic I was fortunate to be able to volunteer as a vaccinator on the frontline to support the NHS during this important time. 

Can you speak to your experience advising a range of organisations, and how this influences your leadership style at Cera? 

It’s allowed me to understand healthcare more deeply, which ultimately helps me to shape Cera’s direction and strategy. 

What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs and leaders in the healthcare industry? 

It’s a marathon not a sprint and you’ve got to pace yourself properly! If you push too hard the risk of burnout and the lack of motivation can really backfire. Overall you need to be sustainable and with industries such as healthcare, it often takes more time than you think.