How finding the right partner can move a solution forward to be accessible

By Gloria Kolb, Co-Founder & CEO – Elitone

Just a couple of months after launching Elitone in the UK, we were delighted to become an approved supplier to the NHS in March this year, to provide Trusts throughout the UK with Elitone as a new solution for pelvic health and incontinence.

The NHS is the UK’s publicly funded healthcare system that provides care to all its residents, with the majority of services, including doctor and hospital appointments, treatments and stays, free at point of use for most people. It’s the NHS that would help women with pelvic floor and bladder incontinence issues, were they to seek medical help.

Privately paid solutions are also an option, but usually too expensive for most to access.

We recognise that it’s a great achievement to be an approved NHS supplier, especially because it’s well-known that getting new products into the NHS is very complicated; procurement often takes months or years and there are many complexities due to its vast size (the NHS is the biggest employer in Europe), numerous stakeholders, the need to adhere to strict regulations and the necessity to balance cost-effectiveness with patient needs.

To help us achieve our goal, we met a proactive procurement company, through an industry trade show, that believed in our product, and now Elitone is available with NHS through HealthTrust Europe, a British public sector procurement company contracted by Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust.

From 1 March 2025, Elitone was available across every one of the 217 individual National Health Trusts in the UK, offering a home delivery service of the products to help women who suffer with stress urinary incontinence, alongside a prescription service.

In the competitive selection process, there were, rightly, many criteria to fulfil to be considered as a supplier, with effectiveness, regulatory approvals, ease of access and cost-effectiveness making up part of the necessary criteria.

Elitone’s decade of providing a revolutionary incontinence tech solution in the US, backed by years of research and clinical trials, as well as nine patents, positively contributed to HealthTrust choosing Elitone as a new solution.

HealthTrust also recognised that adding more support in the UK for incontinence into their framework would enable the company to offer women greater access to innovative, effective, non-invasive care options.

It took the insistence of women within the framework to ensure this new category was created.

In the UK, it can be difficult to enter the NHS as a supplier, so it is wonderful that procurement companies like HealthTrust exist to provide another avenue for access, as well as ease the navigation of the competitive process.

The success of their Trust is in part due to bringing in new and innovative products, so they are motivated to ensure successful applications.

Elitone is now available for all UK healthcare professionals to access through the HealthTrust Europe Continence Goods and Services 2024 framework, Framespan.

It’s exciting to know that the 12 million women in the UK that suffer can now access this first-of-its-kind support through the NHS, signalling major progress for women’s health.

What’s more, with urinary incontinence currently costing the NHS almost £2 billion every year, it will help contribute to cost savings for the healthcare sector.

Elitone launched in the UK in January this year, available through various British online suppliers, such as Pharmacy2U and Currys, but the real success story for us is making the solution available through the NHS, offering a new and effective solution, for which those who suffer won’t need to pay, as they can now access it via their doctor or consultant.

It’s reported that the average woman spends £600 every year on incontinence solutions in the UK if they don’t seek medical help, so with this new availability, those individuals can save too.

We are delighted that this new opportunity will bring the benefits of Elitone to women in the UK.

Likewise, in the US, we have participated in an equally rigorous process with the help of partners to be an approved Medicare supplier of incontinence treatments.

Medicare, also a government programme, understands the cost of incontinence and supports preventative and at-home treatments.

As we look to the future, we sincerely hope we will be able to take Elitone to even more countries worldwide with the right partners, to offer an effective treatment solution for healthcare settings to help individuals overcome an issue that negatively affects them on a daily basis.

Gloria Kolb is the CEO and co-founder of Elitone, the first non-invasive, FDA-cleared, wearable treatment for women with urinary incontinence.

Elitone’s accolades include winning Best New Product by My Face My Body, Sling Shot, CES’ Innovation Award among many others. As an inventor with 30+ patents and advocate for women’s health, Gloria has been featured in Forbes as a Top Scientist Driving Innovation in Women’s Health, TechRound’s Top Women in Tech, Boston’s “40 Under 40” and MIT Review’s “World’s Top Innovators under 35.”

She has engineering degrees from MIT and Stanford, and an Entrepreneurship MBA from Babson College.