Evidence from Thames Freeport’s Mobile Health Innovation Platform, the mobile health unit that took preventative health checks into Barking and Dagenham, Havering and Thurrock, has underpinned a successful bid to Google’s Global Impact Challenge on AI for Government. Thames Freeport is the lead beneficiary of the resulting project, Project SNOW, and the Thames Estuary is one of its two national delivery sites.
A preventative health pilot commissioned and funded by Thames Freeport has won international support, with the Google.org Impact Challenge on AI for Government funding a two-year programme to build on it.
Project SNOW, led by the University of Warwick, was one of 15 projects selected from more than 2,600 applications worldwide, drawing on Google.org’s $30 million global fund for AI in government. Thames Freeport is the lead beneficiary, as it was for the pilot that produced the evidence behind the bid. The Thames Estuary and the West Midlands will be the two delivery geographies.
The Thames Freeport Mobile Health Innovation Platform, known locally as the Health Bus put a pharmacy led, digitally enabled health unit into high streets, workplaces, places of worship and community hubs across the three freeport authorities, offering blood pressure, cholesterol and cardiovascular risk checks to working age adults. It was funded from the retained business rates that Thames Freeport reinvests in the area, and delivered by Avencera as Thames Freeport’s strategic delivery partner, with PUBLIC, L Marks together with FourthSpace, Jeenie, ESRI, PocDoc, Holly Health, My MHealth and Community Pharmacy North East London.
The results made the case. More than three quarters of those seen said they would not have had the check through any other route. The pilot found over 25 previously undiagnosed cases needing GP follow up, and nearly 200 people consented to their results being written back to their GP record.
It also worked economically. Cost per patient across the whole pilot, carrying every fixed cost, was around £167. Across the final two operating days, with the model running at pace, 91 patients were seen in 11.5 hours at around £41 each. That fall is what makes the model credible at scale, and it is what the successor programme is designed to test further.
Stuart Rimmer, Chief Executive of Thames Freeport, said: “We put a health bus on the road for nine weeks across Barking and Dagenham, Havering and Thurrock, and more people climbed aboard than we had room to see. It found more than twenty five conditions that nobody knew were there.”
“That evidence has now drawn a world leading university, a global funder and a two-year programme into region and expanding beyond it.”
“More than three quarters of the people who walked onto that bus would not have had that check by any other route open to them. They were at work, or on the high street, and the health service had no way of reaching them. That is the Inverse Care Law, fifty-five years old this year and remarkably hard to shift. It yields to one thing: knowing, street by street and week by week, where the need sits, and going there.”
What happens next
Over two years the consortium aims to deliver more than 3,000 screenings, refer over 100 previously undiagnosed conditions to GPs, and publish a health data ontology as an open standard for England’s integrated care boards.
The programme runs two strands. The first delivers preventative services directly into underserved communities and workplaces, testing mobile outreach across the Thames Freeport area against screening embedded in hospitals, pharmacies and GP surgeries, so the NHS can see which model works better at scale. The second turns the resulting data into a live, zone level picture of community health risk for the NHS and local authorities, structured against clinical data standards.
The consortium also joins a three-month Google.org accelerator, with technical training, access to Google infrastructure and mentoring from Google AI experts. It runs from a kick off in Washington DC this week, through a 60 day build sprint, to a demo day in London in the week of 7 December 2026.
Tom White, Innovation and Skills Director at Thames Freeport and sponsor of the Mobile Health Innovation Platform, said: “The hard part of the pilot was never the technology. It was knowing where to put the unit on a Tuesday morning and making sure that what happened on board reached somebody’s GP record afterwards. That is the bit Project SNOW takes on, and it is the bit the health service most needs solving.”
The consortium
Project SNOW is led by the University of Warwick, which receives the Google.org funding and leads communications for the consortium. FourthSpace Labs leads technical development of the platform, with hardware and telecommunications infrastructure from AiMSnet. Avencera and PUBLIC lead local delivery, evaluation and stakeholder engagement. Thames Freeport is lead beneficiary.
