Elevate enters public beta: 200 users shaping a new approach to metabolic health

Poor metabolic health is placing a growing burden on individuals, families and health services across the UK. Diabetes UK estimates that almost six million people are now living with diabetes, while more than twelve million adults have diabetes or prediabetes.

The pressure is visible at a local level too. In Somerset, where Black Pear provides the SIDeR+ shared care record, more than 30,000 people are living with diabetes. Around 90% have type 2 diabetes, and NHS Somerset estimates that, without action to reduce people’s risk, 53,000 people in the county could have type 2 diabetes by 2030. Source: NHS Somerset ICB, “Somerset launches campaign to raise awareness of Type 2 Diabetes”, 10 June 2024.

Those figures describe a challenge that cannot be addressed through occasional clinical contact alone. Nutrition, physical activity, sleep, stress and other everyday factors all influence metabolic health. People need practical support between appointments, while practitioners need a clearer picture of the patterns behind a person’s progress.

That is the purpose of Elevate.

Developed and operated by Black Pear Software, Elevate is provided by the Public Health Collaboration (PHC) as a digital lifestyle and wellbeing service. It has now entered public beta, with 200 users onboarded and helping shape its next stage.

Making everyday health information useful

Most people already generate fragments of useful health information. Meals may be recorded in one place, activity in another and sleep somewhere else. Measurements such as weight, blood pressure or blood glucose may sit in a notebook, a device or an app.

Individually, each fragment says relatively little. Brought together over time, they can help a person understand how their daily choices interact.

Elevate gives members a single place to record and review:

• Nutrition and meals.
• Exercise and activity.
• Sleep.
• Mental wellbeing.
• Health measurements and trends.

The service combines these records with evidence-based content and an AI-supported health coach. Its role is to help members reflect on their own information, recognise patterns and build sustainable habits. Elevate does not provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

One server supporting the whole service

The Elevate App and Elevate Web are two ways for members to use the service. A separate Practitioner Portal supports PHC-accredited health coaches. All three connect to the same Elevate Server, so the same identity, permission and governance rules apply whichever interface is being used.

The server provides the services that make Elevate work:

• Accounts, identity and sharing permissions.
• A structured personal health and lifestyle record.
• The AI-supported health coach.
• Knowledge content and messaging.
• Permissioned practitioner access.
• De-identified analysis and reporting.

Underneath these services sits the protected operational data store: one identifiable record for each member. A separate analysis dataset can be created only after direct identifiers have been removed and records have been combined.

Supporting people—and the practitioners helping them

Elevate is designed to make personal information useful first to the person who recorded it.

A member can review changes over time, compare different parts of their lifestyle and decide where they want to focus. Instead of responding to a single measurement, they can begin to see the wider context around it.

Where a member wants practitioner support, they can choose to share selected categories from their live Elevate record with a PHC-accredited health coach. This is not a blanket release of everything the service holds.

Practitioner access is:

• Explicit: the member chooses to grant access.
• Granular: sharing can be limited to selected categories.
• Reversible: permissions can be changed or withdrawn.
• Auditable: the service records the permission rather than assuming it.

This gives the practitioner a more continuous picture of the member’s lifestyle between conversations, while keeping the member in control of what can be seen.

From service analysis to future research

Elevate can also help PHC learn at a population level, but this is a different use of data and follows a different route through the platform.

For service analysis, direct identifiers are removed and information is combined across users. This allows PHC, supported by Black Pear as its data processor, to understand how the service is being used, where members encounter difficulty and which parts of Elevate need improvement.

Over time, the same governed approach could support a powerful research database containing de-identified lifestyle and metabolic-health information. Such a dataset could help researchers study relationships across nutrition, activity, sleep, wellbeing and health measurements at a scale that is difficult to achieve through short studies or occasional questionnaires.

That research database is a future opportunity, not a claim about the current public beta. Any research use would need:

• A clearly defined and legitimate purpose.
• An appropriate lawful basis and consent where required.
• Effective anonymisation or de-identification.
• Ethical and information-governance approval.
• Strict controls over access and use.

The separation is fundamental. Practitioners use identifiable information only when a member has authorised access. Analysis begins only after direct identifiers have been removed.

Why the Somerset perspective matters

Black Pear has seen the value of structured, shared information through SIDeR+ in Somerset. A shared care record helps authorised professionals work from a more complete clinical picture rather than isolated fragments held by different services.

Elevate applies a related principle to information generated in daily life: bring important data together, make it useful to the individual and share it with a practitioner only when the individual chooses.

The two services are not connected in the current Elevate beta, and Elevate is not reading from Somerset NHS records. The Somerset diabetes figure illustrates the scale of the metabolic-health challenge; it is not a claim that Elevate is currently deployed as part of Somerset’s diabetes pathway.

The longer-term opportunity is to bridge the gap between what happens in formal care and what happens during the rest of a person’s week—safely, transparently and with appropriate governance.

What 200 beta users will help us learn

The first 200 onboarded users give PHC and Black Pear a meaningful opportunity to test Elevate in everyday use.

The public beta will help the teams understand:

• Whether onboarding and daily recording feel clear and manageable.
• Which insights members find useful when trying to change habits.
• How well nutrition, activity, sleep and wellbeing work as one experience.
• How practitioner access fits real coaching relationships.
• Where privacy and consent explanations need to improve.
• What must be strengthened before the service grows further.

Two hundred users is an important product milestone, but it is not evidence of health outcomes. Demonstrating outcomes will require appropriate evaluation over time. The immediate priority is to listen, learn and improve the service responsibly.

Poor metabolic health is a national problem expressed through millions of individual lives. Elevate is being built to help each person understand their own information, invite support when they want it and contribute to wider learning without surrendering their identity.

We are grateful to the first 200 users helping PHC and Black Pear discover what that model can achieve.

Learn more about Elevate at elevate-me.life.