LocANTS: Bringing specialist care to the bedside
Discover how LocANTS is bringing specialist expertise to the bedside, reducing unnecessary neonatal transfers and helping more babies receive care closer to home.
In acute and critical care, the ability to access specialist expertise at the right moment can make a critical difference. But when specialist support is not immediately available, local clinical teams can be faced with high-stakes decisions with limited remote guidance, sometimes resulting in transfers that could have been avoided.
For Ranadip Chatterjee, the answer was create something to bring the specialist to the patient, rather than moving the patient to the specialist.
What is LocANTS and what problem does it solve?
LocANTS, developed by resPNse Medical, is a real-time, video-based live clinical collaboration platform designed specifically for acute and critical care. It can run flexibly on a mobile phone or tablet, or through a dedicated high-definition video platform mounted on a medical-grade cart-on-wheels.
In critical care, such as neonatal emergencies, local clinicians often have to make high-stakes decisions with limited remote specialist guidance. This can frequently lead to unnecessary and distressing patient transfers.
LocANTS solves this by putting frontline teams and specialists on the exact same live screen. By securely streaming live video, vitals and monitoring feeds directly from the point of care, remote consultants can see what the local team sees, annotate screens and agree on the best care plan in minutes.
“The results speak for themselves. In a real-world acute care deployment, 67% of babies who would have typically been transferred to specialist hospitals were able to be treated safely close to home.”
This eliminates unnecessary travel, keeps families together during their most vulnerable moments, relieves capacity pressures across NHS specialist units and actively reduces the healthcare system’s carbon footprint.
What was your inspiration and motivation?
The spark for LocANTS came directly from the frontline of NHS acute care.
Co-Founder Dr Arun Dhar, while returning from an exhausting neonatal transfer, asked a fundamental question: Why can’t everyone involved — local doctors, specialist consultants and parents — be virtually present at the cot-side at the same time?
Driven by the vision that technology could bridge the gap between acute bedside teams and tertiary experts, Dr Dhar partnered with technology and data specialist Ranadip Chatterjee. Together with pioneering clinicians at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and the PaNDR transport team, LocANTS was co-designed alongside the doctors, nurses and parents who rely on it.
“Our core belief was simple: no family should face the anguish of separation or transfer if world-class specialist expertise can be brought virtually to their bedside in seconds.”
“Our core belief was simple: no family should face the anguish of separation or transfer if world-class specialist expertise can be brought virtually to their bedside in seconds.”
Hearing a parent say how reassuring it was to have top specialists virtually in the room, or seeing frontline clinicians gain instant confidence because expert eyes are watching the same live feed, is what inspires them every single day.
In trials, 100% of clinicians reported that LocANTS improved decision-making, and 100% of parents agreed it significantly improved their experience. Knowing that the technology directly saves lives, keeps families intact during medical crises and empowers NHS staff to deliver equitable, high-quality care wherever it is needed provides all the motivation Ranadip and the team will ever need.
Why did you become a fellow?
Becoming an NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA) Fellow is both an extraordinary honour and a powerful validation of our vision for modern, collaborative critical care.
The NHS healthcare ecosystem is complex, and scaling a game-changing MedTech solution requires more than just great technology. It requires system-wide trust, strategic alignment and expert navigation.
“Being part of the NIA community provides LocANTS with invaluable mentorship, national visibility and access to a brilliant network of healthcare leaders who share our passion for transforming patient care.”
For us, it also signals to the wider NHS that LocANTS is a high-impact innovation with the potential to scale and deliver real value nationwide.
Looking ahead
Over the next five years, our goal is to establish LocANTS as the gold standard for real-time virtual collaboration across acute and emergency care nationwide, and beyond.
We are expanding beyond neonatal and paediatric critical care into broader emergency response services, including adult intensive transport, emergency department coordination and pre-hospital paramedic support.
We are also integrating intelligent decision-support layers, such as AI-driven automated risk stratification, with the ambition of transforming LocANTS from a live visual collaboration tool into an active, 24/7 clinical decision aide.
Ultimately, we envision a healthcare system where geography is no longer a barrier to receiving instant, world-class specialist care.
“For us, the future is about making sure that wherever a patient is, the right expertise can be there too.”
Want to find out more? Visit the innovation page where you can contact the innovator directly, or check out their website.
