Nearly 13,000 hospital beds are occupied every day in England by patients who are medically fit to leave, because there isn’t enough capacity in social care to receive them.
In-House Health builds AI-enabled tools to help social care providers identify workforce health risks before they affect retention, profitability or CQC ratings. The company recently won the 2026 Innovate UK Women in Innovation Award.
Emma-Louise Fusari is In-House Health’s founder. She’s a registered nurse with over 20 years in primary care, and spent 24 years running chronic disease management clinics watching the same pattern: society waits until someone’s already unwell, then reacts. We spoke about why the social care sector carries problems harder than almost any other.
Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your role?
I’m Emma-Louise Fusari, founder of In-House Health Limited, a digital health start-up. We’re combing healthcare expertise and AI enabled technology to help the social care sector establish and eliminate the root cause of work-related ill health issues before it impacts profitability and care quality outcomes. I’m also a registered nurse, with over 20 years of experience in primary care.
How did your company come about, and what was the motivation behind it?
Spending 24 years running chronic disease management clinics and delivering public health promotion and screening programmes taught me the same lesson over and over again. Society waits until someone’s already unwell, then we react. I wanted to build something that caught health risks while they were still inexpensive and easier to fix, and the workplace is the perfect place to do that.
In-House Health started broader than it is today. The deeper I went, the clearer it became that the social care sector carries problems harder than almost any other, irregular shift patterns, physical strain, emotional labour, and a predominantly female workforce, all with a regulator watching every outcome.
Nearly four in five social care organisations, 79%, cite burnout as a major challenge facing their workforce. And 73% of frontline care workers are already showing elevated emotional exhaustion, carrying other people’s pain, grief and fear every single day, with almost nothing structured in place to catch it before it impacts them, or the people in their care.
Can you describe your mission and values?
Our mission is to help social care providers know where the risk sits in their workforce, before it costs them an employee, profitability or a Care Quality Commission (CQC) rating.
Health and Wellbeing is not something you do. It’s the outcome of what you do. And outcomes need to be measured, otherwise you’re just guessing and paying lip service with fluffy initiatives.
Three things guide how we work. Everything is clinically led, because a framework built by someone who’s never worked a shift in this sector isn’t worth much to the people using it. Everything is evidence based, because I’ve spent a career watching decisions get made on gut feel when the data was sitting there unused. And I’ll always tell a customer plainly what’s capable today and what isn’t yet in our technology, because trust matters more to me than sounding further along than we are.
What are some of the most pressing social issues that In-House Health is working to address?
Nearly 13,000 hospital beds are occupied every day in England by patients who are medically fit to leave, because there isn’t enough capacity in social care to receive them, costing the NHS an estimated £2.7 billion a year (King’s Fund, 2026). Every one of those beds is a workforce problem as much as a system one, a stretched, unwell social care workforce simply can’t absorb the people the NHS needs to discharge. Zoom out further and UK employers lose an estimated £85 billion a year to poor workplace health across the whole economy (Keep Britain Working Review). And underneath all of this sits a data gap: nobody’s systematically collecting the population health data in workplaces that would catch conditions like type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease early. The social care sector is where all of this collides hardest and gets addressed least.
How does your company measure the impact of its work in creating positive change?
When workforce health improves, you see it everywhere in an organisation, not just in the numbers you’d expect. Retention holds up, but so does care quality, so does the confidence a leadership team has walking into an inspection. That’s the real impact, an organisation that’s no longer managing health as a series of one-off crises, but as something it can see coming and get ahead of. We treat that as evidence, not sentiment, comparing where an organisation started to where it ends up, so leaders can show what’s actually changed rather than describe how something felt.
In your opinion, what impact will technology have in creating a better future?
Used well, technology should shrink the gap between a problem existing and someone noticing it. You see it everywhere tech for good is done properly, safeguarding systems flagging a vulnerable person or situations before a crisis rather than after one. The pattern’s the same wherever it works: less time spent describing what already happened, more time spent surfacing a risk while there’s still room to act on it. That’s the shift I think matters most, whatever sector you’re applying it to.
What advice do you have for other companies looking to use tech for good and positively impact the world?
Profit isn’t a dirty word. For every pound in the bank, something good could have happened for it to land there. Being in the tech for good space is harder than it looks from the outside, and it’s getting more crowded. Stay tethered to the actual people and impact you’re building for, not the pitch deck version of your business that others want to see.
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In-House Health Limited won the 2026 Innovate UK Women in Innovation Award, as well as the Havas Boost Business Competition. Both follow the 2023 Computing Women in Tech Excellence Award win for Innovator of the Year.
Learn more about In-House Health Limited by visiting inhousehealth.co.uk
