• The collaboration integrates uMed's study services with Cera's national home healthcare network, leveraging routine care visits for real-world data collection - and creating a feedback loop for diagnosis, treatment, and improved outcomes at scale.
• Despite carrying a disproportionate burden of disease, older adults in home-based care remain among the most underrepresented groups in clinical research. Their comorbidities, disease progression rates, and long-term health trajectories represent a uniquely informative cohort for real-world evidence generation.
• This model embeds recruitment, consent, and longitudinal data collection within existing care relationships, giving life science institutions and trial sponsors sustained access to a population that has until now been structurally absent from the evidence base.

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LONDON, UK, 05 MAY 2026: UK-based real-world evidence and study management provider, uMed, has today partnered with Cera, Europe's largest HealthTech company and automated living registry platform, to integrate clinical research into home-based care delivery across the UK. 

The partnership extends access to a historically hard-to-reach patient population, overcoming mobility and tech adoption barriers that otherwise severely limit participation in clinical research by patients over 65. 

Older adults in home-based care represent a clinically complex patient cohort, often living with chronic disease, multimorbidity, and more advanced disease progression, which translates to a uniquely rich dataset for real-world evidence generation. Their structural absence from clinical research has to-date posed a significant evidence gap for life science institutions and trial sponsors. IUPHAR Geriatric Committee¹ attributes this gap in part to a lack of consistency in methodology between studies, and difficulty synthesising research findings across different trial cohorts.

By embedding recruitment, consent, and data collection within established care delivery, the partnership gives researchers access to real-time clinical data from 86,000+ daily home healthcare visits to enable identification of eligible participants based on clinical relevance rather than proximity to a trial site. 

"By partnering with Cera, we can find the right participants faster and keep them engaged longer — accelerating recruitment without adding burden to providers or patients," said Matt Wilson MD, Founder and CEO of uMed.

"The home is where care happens, so it makes sense for it to be where clinical research happens too. This partnership removes the physical barriers to participation, ensuring the next generation of medicines are developed for — and with — the people who need them most," said Dr Ben Maruthappu MBE, Co-founder and CEO of Cera.

In addition to expanding the diversity of trial cohorts, the model at scale gives way to development of a geriatric baseline; overcoming methodological fragmentation, and facilitating more patient-centred, predictive and robust real-world evidence. "By embedding research into home-based care pathways, we can generate more robust and generalisable real-world data that better reflects the populations most affected by the conditions we are studying," noted Associate Professor Mark Toshner, University of Cambridge.

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References:
¹ IUPHAR Geriatric Committee. https://agsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jgs.18826 

About uMed

uMed is a real-world evidence and patient cohort company that makes clinical research participation easier and more representative. Through its ACCESS Cohorts platform, uMed builds national, longitudinal registries by linking electronic health records with scalable patient-reported outcomes, generating high-quality real-world data across various conditions. uMed partners with health systems, life-science companies, and care providers to accelerate research, improve understanding of patient journeys, and support evidence generation for regulators, payers, and clinical decision-making. Originally founded in the U.K. and headquartered in Boston. https://umed.io/ 

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uMed Media Contact     

Serena Macleod

Phone: +44 7787 537370

Email: serena.macleod@umed.io

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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 was co‑founded by entrepreneur, physician and policy expert Dr Ben Maruthappu MBE. 

Cera Media Contact     

Niki Goddard

Phone: 07584687560

Email: niki.goddard@ceracare.co.uk

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