Hero Health vs. Anima Health

Hero Health vs. Anima Health: A Comparison for Modern Primary Care

With supply and demand increasingly imbalanced in NHS primary care, digital triage is seen as a vital tool for giving practices some ability to manage patient demand outside of scarcely available GP appointments. Finding the right online consultation and workflow management tool is therefore crucial, as is using the best patient communication tools to enable seamless remote care management.

Hero Health and Anima Health are two platforms designed to support primary care teams in managing patient requests and clinical workflows. However, there are notable differences between the two, particularly regarding ease of use and functionality. Anima Health raised £10M of venture capital funding to build a triage solution, and are now used in over 100 GP practices nationally.

This guide compares Hero Health and Anima Health, providing primary care professionals with insights into which platform best fits their needs.

Key Differences Between Hero Health and Anima Health

User Experience: Hero Health’s Simplicity vs. Anima Health’s Complexity

User experience can make or break a digital healthcare solution, especially when it impacts both patients and clinicians. Hero prides itself on being simple to use for clinicians, administrators and patients. Anima Health has a broad set of functionality, but from what we've heard, this can create a more complex user experience.

• Hero Health: The Hero platform is known for its intuitive, simple interface that makes it easy for patients to complete requests and for staff to manage workflows efficiently. With a streamlined design, Hero Health focuses on user-friendly interactions, ensuring patients don’t struggle to complete forms or access services.
• Anima Health:
  • Users have reported that Anima can be complex for patients to navigate, particularly when completing medical forms. Anima's triage requires that a substantial amount of information is collected from patients to complete a submission - this complexity can lead to incomplete submissions or patients needing additional support.
  • For clinicians, Anima retrieves substantial clinical information into the platform. Whilst for high-functioning users, this likely augments decision making, it also creates a complex and sometimes overwhelming interface, more akin to a clinical record system. Despite this, clinicians have reported that they information is duplicative and they still require the clinical record system to be open, and administartors find the Anima interface very busy and confusing.

Cross-Organisational Functionality: Hero Health’s Seamless Integration

Working across organisations and within Primary Care Networks requires robust cross-functional support. Both Hero and Anima have some level of cross-organisational working, but the exact implementation differs.

• Hero Health: Hero provides native cross-organisational booking - whether driven by an administrator making a cross-organisational booking on behalf of a patient, or by a administrator inviting a patient to book cross-organisationally with an appointment link. This feature simplifies patient access across multiple practices and reduces administrative time, and enables better utilisation of PCN services.
• Anima Health: Anima utilises the GP Connect APIs for scheduling, which requires practices to handle the complex GP Connect appointment book configuration in order to benefit from this service.

Messaging Capabilities: Hero Health’s Rich Functionality Matches Accurx

Effective patient communication is essential, and Hero Health shines here with comprehensive messaging tools. In a space that has been dominated by Accurx for the last 5 years, Hero's solution is the most comparable to Accurx's.

• Hero Health: Delivers robust messaging capabilities that include two-way SMS, batch messaging, and email options with direct links for self-booking. This range of tools allows practices to communicate with patients easily and efficiently. Uniquely compared to Anima, Hero allows for questionnaires to be edited or created entirely from scratch.
• Anima Health: While Anima supports messaging within its platform, it has historically focused more heavily on clinical data collection through triage than on flexible communication tools. Practices requiring varied communication formats may find Anima limited in this regard.

Configurability Is Where Hero Shines

Hero Health stands out from Anima in terms of configurability, and the option to customise the tool to the unique needs of your own general practice, PCN or ICB.

• Hero Health: Within Hero's care navigation triage solution, practices can customise the questions that are required of patients, and the pathways that are made available to patients online. This allows practices to direct patients to relevant locally commissioned services or digital therapeutics. Similarly, within the Hero platform you can configure your own patient questionnaires and your own intake forms required to be completed with a booking.
• Anima Health: Anima's triage is not readily configurable at a practice level, nor does it offer any custom questionnaire building.

Detailed Comparison Table: Hero Health vs. Anima Health

Where Anima differentiates from Hero is in the breadth of its product offering, which now includes triage, a scribe tool and document management. There is certainly merit in this consolidation of otherwise separate tools, but it does limit their ability to focus on the core set of patient communication, triage and scheduling features.

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So, Why Choose Hero Health?

In addition to the various unique features Hero Health offers from a product standpoint, the at 45p per patient, the Hero platform is also substantially cheaper than Anima Health, which sells at over 65p per patient.

This likely comes down to the fact that to justify their large venture capital valuation, Anima needs a high price tag, where as Hero is a family run and owned business, where we have more freedom to set pricing.

Key Benefits of Hero Health:

• Intuitive, Patient-Friendly Interface: Patients can navigate requests and bookings with ease, improving patient satisfaction.
• Comprehensive Messaging: Two-way SMS, batch messaging, and email with self-booking links, allowing for versatile patient engagement
• Customisable and configurable: Adapt triage and questionnaires to your unique needs as a practice
• Price 💷: Save money for your practice

While both Hero Health and Anima Health provide tools to manage patient requests, Hero Health’s simpler user experience, cost-efficiency, and powerful cross-organisational functionality make it an attractive choice for primary care practices. Hero Health supports practices in delivering high-quality patient care without the complexity or high costs often associated with Anima.

For more details on how Hero Health can streamline patient communication and improve your practice’s workflow, get in touch via the Get Started button.