The Allergy Centre of Excellence (ACE) is one of the United Kingdom’s leading specialist allergy services, bringing together internationally recognised professors, specialist nurses, psychologists, dietitians, pharmacists, and other clinicians to provide advanced allergy diagnosis, treatment, and ongoing care.
Founded by Professors George du Toit, Adam Fox OBE, and Gideon Lack, ACE combines world-leading clinical expertise and research with highly specialised services including oral immunotherapy, food challenges, advanced diagnostics, and ongoing management of complex allergic conditions.
But for families living with allergy, the need for expert guidance does not begin and end inside the clinic. Questions arise at home, at school, while travelling, when introducing a new food, following an unexpected reaction, or when symptoms such as eczema, asthma, or hay fever suddenly change. Families may need reassurance, practical advice, help understanding a previous consultation, or simply an expert they can turn to without waiting for another specialist appointment.
ACE saw an opportunity to create a new type of service around those everyday needs. Working with Wellifiy, the team launched Allergy Assist, a subscription-based digital allergy support service that gives families ongoing access to specialist clinicians, virtual appointments, secure messaging, personalised allergy information, educational resources, and practical tools through a dedicated mobile app.
Rather than simply digitising an existing clinic service, Allergy Assist created an entirely new and highly scalable service line for ACE. Specialist nurses can support families remotely, drawing on the wider multidisciplinary team when required, while patients gain a trusted clinical relationship that continues between appointments and beyond formal treatment programmes.
ACE had already built an exceptional clinical service around the diagnosis and treatment of allergic disease. Its specialist teams support families managing food allergies, eczema, asthma, allergic rhinitis, oral immunotherapy, and other complex conditions, with patients benefiting from access to some of the world’s most experienced clinicians in the field.
However, much of allergy management happens outside formal appointments. A parent may need advice about an eczema flare on a Tuesday evening. They may have questions about travelling with allergies, introducing a new food to a baby, replacing expired adrenaline devices, preparing a child for school, or understanding information discussed during a previous consultation.
For many of these situations, waiting for another consultant appointment is neither necessary nor ideal.
ACE recognised an opportunity to create an additional layer of care that could:
Give families easier access to specialist allergy expertise between appointments.
Allow patients to ask questions and receive practical support without needing an in-person consultation.
Offer same-day telephone and video appointments when more immediate clinical input was appropriate.
Ensure families were receiving trusted, clinically reviewed allergy information rather than navigating conflicting information online.
Make personalised emergency and allergy-management information readily accessible.
Maintain continuity with ACE’s professors, dietitians, psychologists, pharmacists, and wider multidisciplinary team.
Extend support beyond the end of intensive treatment programmes such as oral immunotherapy.
Create a service capable of reaching substantially more families without every interaction relying directly on scarce consultant capacity or physical clinic space.
ACE partnered with Wellifiy to create a dedicated digital environment specifically around the Allergy Assist model. The platform was configured around a deliberately simple patient experience.
Families can open the app and quickly access the functions most important to them, including contacting the clinical team, booking support, accessing their allergy information, and finding trusted educational resources.
Behind that simple experience sits a flexible clinical platform that enables ACE to manage memberships, consultations, communications, resources, patient information, and ongoing care.
Secure in-app messaging gives families a direct channel to the Allergy Assist clinical nursing team allowing users to ask important questions as they arise.
Highly experienced specialist nurses can resolve many questions directly, while still having access to ACE’s professors and wider multidisciplinary team where additional expertise is required.
Families can book telephone and secure video consultations directly through the platform according to clinician availability.
Self-service booking removes many of the manual steps traditionally involved in arranging support and allows ACE to make same-day and extended-hours appointments available through a structured digital workflow.
One of the most important parts of managing serious food allergy is knowing exactly what to do when a reaction occurs.
Working together, ACE and Wellifiy adapted the platform to create a dedicated allergy action-plan experience that can reflect a child’s prescribed medication and individual requirements.
Families can quickly access essential information through the app when they need it and keep important instructions readily available as their child grows and prescriptions change.
ACE has built an extensive library of clinically reviewed educational material directly into Allergy Assist.
Families can access videos, information sheets, and practical guidance covering areas such as food allergy, eczema, asthma, allergic rhinitis, adrenaline devices, nasal sprays, immunotherapy, and everyday allergy management.
Importantly, education becomes part of the ongoing service rather than something delivered once during a consultation and potentially forgotten.
Depending on their membership, patients can also access ACE’s specialist psychologist and dietitian, alongside virtual peer-support sessions.
This creates a more holistic model in which the ongoing practical and psychological burden of living with allergy can be addressed alongside clinical management.
Clinical assessments including asthma-control measures can be completed digitally, while feedback forms allow ACE to capture patient experience within the same environment.
Over time, this creates opportunities to understand how families are engaging with Allergy Assist, monitor relevant outcomes, and continue refining the service around patient need.
Allergy Assist has enabled ACE to take expertise that traditionally sits within specialist appointments and make it available through a new recurring membership model. That changes the economics and scalability of the service.
Growth is no longer tied solely to adding consulting rooms or increasing the number of appointments delivered by senior specialists. For ACE, Allergy Assist opens an entirely new stream of service delivery alongside its established clinical offering.
For patients completing treatments such as oral immunotherapy, the relationship with ACE no longer has to end when the intensive treatment programme concludes.
Ongoing Allergy Assist memberships provide families with continued access to trusted education and specialist advice as they move into longer-term allergy management.
ACE’s expertise now creates value even when no clinician is actively speaking with the patient.
Families can revisit educational resources, instructional videos, allergy information, and personalised plans whenever they need them.
Content that might previously have been explained repeatedly during individual consultations can now support many families while remaining available around the clock.
The combination of messaging, virtual appointments, education, clinical information, and multidisciplinary support means patients experience ACE as an ongoing partner rather than a service they encounter only during scheduled appointments.
Families can move between self-guided information and direct clinical support depending on what they need at that moment.
Allergy Assist creates a foundation from which ACE can continue expanding the way it supports families living with allergic disease.
ACE’s physical centres remain essential for diagnostics, oral immunotherapy, food challenges and other treatments requiring face-to-face clinical supervision. Allergy Assist extends that care beyond the clinic, enabling a growing part of the ongoing support journey to be delivered digitally.
More broadly, the partnership between ACE and Wellifiy shows how a flexible patient engagement platform can support more than the digitisation of an existing service. It can provide the foundation for organisations to design, launch and scale entirely new models of care.