The former medics whose brain app is now at number two on the App Store. The longtime neurosurgeon using tech to automate telephone consultations. The ex-A&E doctor using AI to get NHS staff into work 16 times faster than they were previously.
As junior doctors gear up for their third round of strikes in a dispute over pay, these are just some of the medics working to save the profession they felt forced to leave by building their own healthtech platforms instead.
According to a recent survey by the British Medical Association, four in 10 junior doctors are actively planning to quit the NHS due to burnout and mounting pressures – and recent years have seen increasing swathes of them joining the UK’s army of healthtech leaders working to find smart solutions.
Investors say the UK is fast becoming the Silicon Valley of Europe’s healthtech sector, with investment in the industry skyrocketing from just £345.48m in 2016 to £3.1bn in 2021.
Here, ten London doctorpreneurs share their stories.
“100K people say Mindstep has improved their cognition and mood”
Dr Aaron Lin, 24, co-founder and COO of Mindstep
His startup in a nutshell: A neuroscience app that remotely delivers complete digital care for your brain, from anxiety to migraines — and with the same accuracy as a GP.
I spent five years training to be a doctor, three of them in hospitals. The lack of capacity in secondary mental health and neurological services meant that patients were receiving suboptimal care or struggling to access care at all — some were waiting up to 18 months for an appointment.
After qualifying in 2018, I teamed up with my fellow medic Hamzah Selim to build an app that could deliver mental health and neurological support to people who needed it whilst waiting for an appointment. A few months previously, Hamzah had been sitting in a final-year neuroscience lecture, learning how to track eye movements to assess neurological disorders, such as dementia. Distracted and bored, he turned to Snapchat, quickly realising that the technology to apply Snapchat filters tracked users’ eye movements.
Hamzah came to me with the idea of using this same technology to assess the neurological indicators he’d been learning about. Together, we developed our “pocket neurologist” app, Mindstep, and sounded it out with various A&E neurologists as part of a research programme. The app launched formally last year, offering a seven-minute brain assessment screens for the most common mental health and neurological conditions — anxiety, depression, concussion, brain fog, and dementia. By identifying your weaker areas and recommending scientifically-proven solutions, the app creates a brain-care plan according to your needs.
Today, Mindstep is a 20-person team and has raised £2.85 million from the likes of leading health tech investors including Octopus Ventures, The Capital Partnership and Calm/Storm. We’ve screened more than 100,000 brains in just four months and been ranked at number two on the App Store for much of that time, with 86 per cent of users showing improvements in their cognition and mood after just two weeks of using the app.
“Bloomful has triaged 4,000 gynaecological problems in a matter of weeks”
Dupe Burgess, 37, founder and CEO at Bloomful
Her startup in a nutshell: a platform that helps women get better access to care for their gynaecological health.
I worked as a doctor for seven years before leaving medicine, but quit the job in 2016 because I’d become a bit disillusioned with the NHS and wanted a new challenge. I’m glad I left when I did. After a few years working for NHS trusts with global consulting firm BCG, I circled back to a problem I’d seen in clinical practice: the poor access to care that women have for their gynaecological health. I spent a long time researching the problem and market and founded Bloomful in 2021.
We started by building a triage tool that takes women’s reported symptoms (painful, heavy, or irregular periods, for example), applies some cognitional logic to them and provides content and advice around their symptoms and what to do next. We then link patients with a professional for a remote consultation and help them with various tests they may need.
The first version of our triage tool has been used by more than 4,000 women in just a few weeks and we’re now developing a more sophisticated version. We’ve received equity-free funding from Google and KPMG and already won an award for most promising small business.
“Onboarding NHS staff used to take 60 days – Credentially has reduced this to five”
Dr Kit Latham, 35, co-founder and CEO at Credentially
His startup in a nutshell: an AI platform designed to revolutionise pre-employment checks and onboarding in the NHS, so it is faster, cheaper, and easier for doctors and nurses to start working.
I worked as an A&E doctor in London for four years and found it rewarding, challenging and inspiring in equal measure. But the more time I spent on hospital floors, the more I noticed the inefficiencies in the process of vetting and onboarding new clinicians. The paperwork, cross-checking databases, and sending chase emails took up hours of valuable time for doctors and HR teams. With waiting lists increasing and the workforce burning out quickly, I wanted to create a solution to address these challenges, so founded Credentially in 2016.
Since then, I’ve built a team of 60 full-time staff across the UK, US and Canada and together we have reduced the time it takes to get a clinician ready to see patients from an industry-average of 60 days to a Credentially average of five days. More than 100 healthcare providers across the three continents now use our platform and we’ve helped over 54,000 healthcare staff members to get ready for work an average of 16 times faster than with a manual ‘paperwork’ process. We even heard from one nursing agency which was able to take a nurse from expressing interest in a job to being on a rota within just one day.
Customers are increasing their hiring numbers by over 300 per cent thanks to the efficiency of our platform and this was particularly rewarding to see during the pandemic. Manually, the NHS was only able to onboard 50 staff a week at maximum capacity, but with the help of our automation this shifted to 1,000 a week. This led to onboarding more than 3,000 staff within just three weeks. It’s moments like these that remind us why we started this business in the first place.
“The Royal Marsden says Vinehealth has improved its patients’ quality of life”
Rayna Patel, 35, co-founder and CEO of Vinehealth
Her startup in a nutshell: a startup that builds technology to support cancer patients and NHS cancer services.
Working in the NHS was inspiring and fulfilling in many ways but I often felt frustrated by inefficiencies in the system, including reliance on outdated technology. In 2018, six years into practicing medicine, I co-founded Vinehealth, a technology company enabling NHS cancer services to deliver more personalised, flexible, convenient care for patients. In 2021 I gave up my licence to build the company full-time and we are now a team of 35, from doctors to software engineers.
We have been overwhelmed by the response to our technology so far, both from patients and staff, from oncologists to specialist cancer nurses. More than 20,000 cancer patients have downloaded the platform to date and a study with The Royal Marsden showed that 87 per cent of patients say that using our technology has significantly improved their quality of life thanks to the app’s enabling of them to report and monitor their symptoms, medications, and activity levels.
We’ve heard from hundreds of patients who say how much they value our tool and that it’s given back a sense of control over their health. We have also been selected for national support from NHS England and have partnered with many of the country’s leading cancer charities, including Cancer Research UK, who are working with us to improve the technology even further.
“Lvndr is the UK’s first tech-enabled LGBTQ+ clinic”
Josh Wells, 29, Founding Clinician and Senior Clinical Lead at LVNDR Health
His startup in a nutshell: a CQC-regulated remote clinic offering holistic LGBTQ+ healthcare and wellbeing services designed and enabled by specialist clinicians to deliver care through an end-to-end virtual care app, starting with sexual health.
After qualifying as a pharmacist in 2018 at St George’s Hospital, I worked across organisations including Kingston Hospital and Public Health England. Two years later, LVNDR Health spotted my PhD research on patient-reported outcome measures of medication adherence and brought me in as a founding member of its advisory board, helping to tackle health inequalities through digital innovation.
Since then I have gone on to set up the company’s digital clinic, supporting Lvndr in securing its CQC registration as the UK’s first tech-enabled LGBTQ+ clinic. We are also Europe’s first digital HIV prevention service for the queer community tackling systemic LGBTQ+ health inequalities.
Our team of 13 has successfully launched the UK’s first tech-enabled digital PrEP (Pre-exposure Prophylaxis) service and early evidence suggests that our clinic has reduced consultation times by over 50 per cent, decreased waiting times by over 10 weeks, and has significantly reduced carbon emissions as a complete digital end-to-end service. My ambition is to support future NHS clinical pathways through digital innovation as a vehicle to enhance health outcomes and build a robust model for long-term LGBTQ+ population health.
“Patchwork has saved the NHS £40M in temporary staffing costs”
Dr Anas Nader, 38, co-founder of Patchwork
His startup in a nutshell: a pioneering healthtech company helping managers and clinicians to address staffing challenges and manage their permanent and temporary workforces through one fully-integrated platform.
During my nine years as an doctor on the NHS frontline in London, I sadly witnessed so many of my colleagues pushed to the brink of burnout and found myself starting to experience similar symptoms. I knew something had to change; my co-founder Dr Jing Ouyang and I were determined to build a solution to the outdated, inflexible workforce systems that were exacerbating the pressures impacting so many of our colleagues. We knew that the status quo was simply not sustainable - NHS staff needed greater flexibility, choice and balance in their work patterns and managers needed more effective ways to keep wards safely and reliably staffed. So we launched Patchwork Health in 2016 and I hung up my stethoscope two years later to focus on the business full-time.
One of our most rewarding moments came right near the beginning, when we began to see the first results from our work with our initial partners, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. We helped them to build a digital temporary staff bank, which enables them to plug staffing gaps sustainably and efficiently, while giving their staff access to flexible working. They started saving £1.2 million a year in staffing fees.
Over the seven years since our launch, we’ve onboarded more than 100 healthcare sites across the UK, including the launch of the UK’s largest collaborative staffing bank, which brings together 24 Trusts across the North West, and has helped retain over £6 million in the NHS to date, while enabling up to 5,500 doctors in training to safely and flexibly fill vacancies right across the region. Overall, we’ve been able to help the NHS save an estimated £40 million in temporary staffing costs, enabling almost four million shift hours to be staffed sustainably each year.
“Perci is helping patients to manage cancer as a chronic condition”
Kelly McCabe, 36, co-founder and CEO of Perci Health
Her startup in a nutshell: an online platform that connects cancer patients with expert practitioners, providing on-demand, affordable appointments and personalised care plans.
After spending 13 years working in cancer care in both the NHS and private healthcare, I noticed some important and unfortunately long-standing gaps. Despite receiving excellent care and attention whilst on treatment, many cancer patients describe a sense of abandonment once treatment ends and they move into long-term follow-up. Regular contact with their oncologist or cancer nurse tends to drop away, despite patients often being left with a diverse range of long-term or late effects from treatment and many unanswered questions.
Specialist cancer nurses and Allied Health Professionals (AHPs) are usually best placed to manage these long-term effects and answer questions but they are typically very difficult to access outside of major cancer centres. So patients are left to search for answers in online community forums or rely on their GP.
To tackle this, my co-founder ââMorgan Fitzsimons and I founded Perci Health in late 2020 as a way of bringing a growing community of cancer recovery and rehabilitation experts together onto one digital platform. The aim is to provide everyone impacted by cancer with the long-term care and support they deserve, whilst building tools to enhance the capacity and effectiveness of the cancer AHP workforce.
Over the last two-and-a-half years, our team of 15 has delivered care to hundreds of cancer patients and uncovered some innovative ways to get this vital care funded for patients, such as having it funded through an employer or insurer. At the same time we’ve grown our community of cancer experts to over 60 healthcare professionals from across 15 different disciplines. Our goal is to deliver life-changing healthcare for everyone impacted by cancer, ensuring no treatable side effect is left untreated and begin to manage cancer effectively as a chronic condition.
“I’ve launched the world’s first doctor-led travel consultancy”
Noreen Nguru, 33, founder of What The Doctor Recommends
Her startup in a nutshell: the world’s first doctor-led travel consultancy prescribing wellness travel to tackle the rising rates of stress, anxiety and occupational burnout ravaging the global workforce.
I quit my job as a hospital doctor for the NHS at the height of the pandemic in September 2020 after working a 98-hour stretch and collapsing on a ward round. I was hospitalised for three days and had an epiphany that my patients and I deserved and were worth more than the current NHS model of healthcare.
I began to research the multitude of mental, physical, spiritual and scientific benefits that travel provides when we slow down, and in 2021 I combined my medical, CBT and mindfulness training with my travel knowledge to offer the world’s first doctor-led wellness travel consultancy, What The Doctor Recommends, that prescribes travel as medicine for the mind.
My small team and I work with a trusted directory of wellness tourism partners around the world to design and prescribe holistic individualised itineraries that, when combined with powerful cognitive behavioural coaching pre and post-trip, support stressed professionals and overstretched senior leaders to detox from modern technology, implement fundamental well-being practices and develop long-lasting resilience to occupational burnout.
I have won and been shortlisted for several leadership and travel awards since launching and we have had unanimously positive reviews from our beta test clients of our corporate wellbeing service Prescribed Wellness Travel. My mission now is to educate and help 100,000 overstretched executives, leaders and professionals in high-pressure roles to break the overwork and overwhelm cycle using real-life travel therapy.
“Doctors are curious about side hustles in healthtech – I want to help them”
Rhydian Harris, 32, Fellowship Lead at BiteLabs
His startup in a nutshell: an innovation fellowship to give clinicians the skills, network and confidence to leverage technology to deliver better care for their patients.
My first weekend as an on-call doctor in 2016 involved faxing the ECG (heart tracing) of a patient having a heart attack to another hospital. I knew there must be a more efficient method out there, so joined a startup building a secure photo sharing app. Since then, I’ve been drawn to the opportunity to build healthcare platforms that can serve the needs of more patients in one afternoon than I could ever see and treat in an entire clinical career in the NHS.
I left the NHS to launch BiteLabs at the end of 2021, with the goal of equipping clinicians with the skills and tools they need to build solutions, better engage with health-tech providers and take on advisory work with health tech start ups outside their regular clinical work.
We now have a team of five and the response so far has been humbling. We had thousands of doctors and other healthcare professionals sign up to our fellowship waiting list, and we were oversubscribed with clinicians who already work in healthtech wanting to deliver content and teaching on the fellowship. We’re now partnering with professional organisations for doctors, and health tech companies to place fellows in internships and build impactful products.
So many healthcare professionals (not just doctors) undervalue the skills they have, so helping them to understand where their value is in health tech has been a great feeling. Too often, doing work outside of the NHS as a junior doctor is regarded with suspicion, though more recently this suspicious has turned to curiosity and tips on how to do it. I want to help other doctors leverage technology to improve the care they offer their patients.
“Ufonia has reduced the need for some routine appointments by 60%”
Nick de Pennington, 45, founder and CEO of Ufonia
His startup in a nutshell: A service that combines AI and clinical evidence to automate routine telephone consultations.
Before I left the NHS in 2021, I spent more than ten years working as a neurosurgeon and had a number of so-called lightbulb moments. Neurosurgery has many challenges, but the reality is that a huge amount of it is routine and of low complexity — the most significant realisation for me was understanding that, as a neurosurgeon, I was replaceable. I realised there was the opportunity to combine new AI technologies together to replicate clinicians doing low-complexity tasks, so I left my full-time clinical role in 2016, working part-time to lead a number of digital projects across the Thames Valley, but I eventually realised that the best way to deliver disruptive change was to do it from outside the system.
In 2021, I left the NHS to pursue Ufonia full-time after taking part and winning a hackathon competition sponsored by IBM. Ufonia is now a team of 20 people, including six other current and former NHS staff, and we have already been able to reduce the need for some routine appointments by over 60 per cent.
We are currently deploying an autonomous telemedicine solution called Dora across 13 NHS Trusts across the country and there’s been a lot of enthusiasm for what we’re doing. Every week we are increasing the number of calls delivered to patients and each of those calls means that a patient is receiving care in a more timely fashion and clinicians are being freed to use their skills where they are needed most.
