Cera and Promptly Health Partner to Bridge the ‘Evidence Gap ’in Geriatric Drug Development
11/03/2026Press Release
Lisbon/London, March 2026
Cera, Europe’s largest digital-first home healthcare provider, has announced a global real-world evidence (RWE) partnership with Promptly Health, focused on the over-65s, to accelerate drug development and enable precision medicine.
The partnership integrates Cera’s large-scale, longitudinal home healthcare dataset into Promptly Health’s european data network. This partnership provides life sciences companies with the ‘missing piece ’of the patient journey: real-world insights into treatment performance and clinical outcomes beyond the controlled environment of hospital walls.
By joining Promptly Health’s network - covering approximately 48 million lives across 370 UK and European hospitals - Cera brings vital insight from patients receiving care at home into an increasing European health data ecosystem.
The collaboration is specifically designed to support regulatory submissions, Health Technology Assessments (HTAs) and post-market surveillance. By bridging the evidence gap between randomised controlled trials and real-world practice, the partnership addresses the ‘Generalisability Gap ’that often hinders drug approval for older patients.
Cera’s AI-enabled platform captures data during 2.5 million visits per month, generating a massive dataset of 260 billion data points. This anonymised, longitudinal data includes:
● Treatment adherence: Measuring real-world 'effectiveness' against the idealised 'efficacy' data captured during clinical trials
● Symptom evolution: Mapping the daily trajectory of chronic conditions.
● Patient-generated digital biomarkers: Contextual health information, such as mobility trends, sleep patterns, nutrition, and cognition, that traditional Electronic Health Records (EHRs) often overlook.
Cera’s dataset helps identify patient subgroups most likely to respond to specific treatments, and complements clinical trial data to de-risk drug development for complex, multi-morbid populations.
As regulatory authorities and HTA bodies increasingly emphasise post-market evidence and long-term outcomes, access to harmonised, longitudinal home healthcare data is becoming strategically critical for drug development and market access.
By expanding access to structured RWE from home healthcare settings, Cera and Promptly aim to strengthen evidence generation across Europe and accelerate more personalised, data-informed treatment pathways for pharmaceutical companies.
Dr. Ben Maruthappu MBE, Founder and CEO of Cera, said: "Clinical trials are essential, but they provide only one piece of the evidence needed to develop effective treatments. We are giving pharmaceutical companies longitudinal insight into how treatments perform in routine practice. By capturing the lived experience of over-65s at home, we are helping de-risk the development of new therapies for some of the world’s most complex patient groups."
Promptly Health is an international RWE platform providing harmonised, research-ready home healthcare data to support pharmaceutical companies in non-interventional studies and outcomes-based research. This partnership is Promptly Health’s first focused on the over 65’s.
Pedro Ramos, CEO of Promptly Health, added: "Our strategy is centered on building one-of-a-kind datasets that capture the full patient story. By integrating Cera’s unique insights with our existing hospital data, we are creating a powerful, 360-degree view of health that simply didn’t exist before. This allows researchers to move beyond the clinic and finally solve the evidence gap for complex, multi-morbid populations.
This partnership directly answers the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR)'s recent mandate for the greater inclusion of older adults in research. It also responds to the Chief Medical Officer, Sir Chris Whitty’s warning that older people—particularly those with multiple health conditions—are being routinely sidelined from clinical studies
About Cera
Cera is a digital-first home healthcare company that harnesses technology to bring care directly to people’s homes, transforming the healthcare landscape by providing higher quality services at a fraction of the cost.
Cera’s 10,000 carers and nurses deliver around 2.5 million technology-enabled home healthcare visits a month on behalf of governments, insurers, and the NHS – equivalent in capacity to all NHS A&E departments nationwide – counting a visit every second on average.
Cera is now Europe’s largest HealthTech company and one of its fastest-growing businesses, with c.$500 million in annualised revenues, and 150-fold growth in impact over the past five years. Cera has also gathered the largest home healthcare dataset in Europe, powering the development of cutting-edge AI products that have reduced hospitalisations by up to 70%, saving the UK Government £1.5 million daily.
Cera’s pioneering approach has been recognised by awards including a Newsweek AI Impact Award, the UK Tech Awards ’Tech for Good Prize, Health Tech Digital’s Best Use of Artificial Intelligence, the Deloitte Fast 50 and EY’s prestigious UK Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2024. Cera was recently named by TIME Magazine as one of the World’s Top HealthTech Companies, and has repeatedly been ranked as the UK’s Number 1 HealthTech company.
Cera was co-founded by entrepreneur, physician and policy expert Dr Ben Maruthappu MBE. Its Advisory Board is Chaired by Sir David Behan, the former CEO of the Care Quality Commission.
About Cera Trials at Home
Cera Trials at Home is redefining clinical research by bridging the gap between healthcare needs and trial participation. In the UK, over-65s account for two-thirds of illness but only one-third of clinical trial participants. Cera is closing this gap by leveraging its world-leading home healthcare dataset of more than 250 billion data points to identify and support eligible participants across a range of conditions.
By removing barriers such as travel, accessibility, and lack of awareness, Cera Trials at Home enables patients to access cutting-edge therapies and participate in research safely and comfortably from their own homes.
About Promptly Health
Promptly Health is a European leader in federated health data platforms, enabling secure access to real-world data and patient-generated health insights. The company's privacy-preserving technology allows healthcare organizations, researchers, and pharmaceutical companies to leverage patient data across a network spanning 48 million lives in the UK and EU, while maintaining data sovereignty and GDPR compliance. For more information, visit www.promptlyhealth.com
