Home appointments for the UK’s largest health research programme

Our Future Health is the UK’s largest health research programme, aiming to recruit up to five million volunteers to help researchers understand how diseases develop and find better ways to prevent, detect and treat them. Over 2.5 million people have joined so far.

Building a cohort that reflects the whole country means reducing the barriers that stop people attending a fixed-site appointment: time, access, trust and mobility. But a home visit still has to deliver clinic-grade measurements, verified identity, documented consent, compliant sample handling and a defensible chain of custody, without a site or on-site supervision.

Heim was selected as the delivery partner for a home appointment pilot, deploying trained practitioners into participants’ homes across Birmingham, Bristol and London to take blood samples and physical measurements to the in-clinic protocol.

Participants booked through Heim’s white-labelled portal against live practitioner availability, with every appointment routed by our allocation engine. The programme team followed every visit in real time through the Trial Manager dashboard, and the Heim Companion App enforced each protocol step, double-scanned every sample and verified identity with a blind date-of-birth check, even offline.

95.3% of appointments were completed, 95.5% of blood samples taken and 96.7% of visits captured every required body measurement. Venepuncture success reached 99.31%, and 99% of samples met the laboratory’s criteria for DNA extraction and genotyping.

Participants rated the experience 4.95 out of 5 and 96% would recommend an at-home appointment. Most chose it for convenience, and others because travelling to a clinic was difficult or their health limited their mobility. Samples reached the lab within a 30-hour turnaround.