Webinar: Beyond the hospital walls: Scaling Canadian health tech in the new NHS

 

About this recording

This webinar explores the opportunities and realities for Canadian health technology companies looking to expand into the UK. Featuring founders and ecosystem experts from PhenoTips, Healthy.io, Klarify, and Innovate UK, the discussion dives into how the NHS operates in practice—highlighting both its similarities to and differences from the Canadian healthcare system.

Panelists share firsthand insights on navigating NHS procurement, building clinical partnerships, demonstrating system-wide value, and successfully moving from pilot to scale. The session also covers key considerations around regulation, evidence generation, and emerging priorities such as digital transformation and sustainability.

Whether you’re early in your international expansion journey or actively exploring the UK market, this session offers practical guidance on how to position your solution, avoid common pitfalls, and identify pathways to adoption within one of the world’s largest public healthcare systems.

---

Speakers

Orion Buske, co-founder, ceo, PhenoTips

Sarah Bruce-White, ecosystem innovation growth specialist, Innovate UK Business Growth

Moody Abdul, co-founder & ceo, Klarify

Misghana Kassa (moderator), senior associate, Health Sciences, MaRS Discovery District

---

Transcript

Thank you for attending today’s webinar, Beyond the Hospital Walls, Scaling Canadian Health Tech in the New NHS. My name is Masgana Kassa. I’m a senior associate on the health sciences team here at Mars, and I’ll be moderating today’s session. Today’s session is presented in partnership with Export Development Canada, Innovate UK, and Mars.

Expert Development Canada is dedicated to building a tailored and dedicated portfolio of services to help Canadian science and tech companies expand and conduct businesses globally. Mars accelerates the growth of Canadian science and technology based companies into global businesses. We are North America’s largest urban innovation hub, occupying one point five million square feet in downtown Toronto. Mars has direct access to more than fourteen hundred companies that the organization supports across multiple sectors.

Mars works closely with government, federal, provincial and municipal, public agencies, corporates, financial institutions, investors, nonprofits and academic institutions. You can access our resources and learn more about our services by visiting our website at marsdd dot com.

Innovate UK is the UK’s innovation agency to help UK businesses to grow through innovation. The government’s vision is for the UK to be a global hub for innovation by two thousand and thirty five.

By helping companies to grow through their development and commercialization of new products, processes and services supported by an outstanding innovation ecosystem that is agile, inclusive and easy to navigate.

This session is being recorded and will be posted in our international growth collection.

I’d like to begin by acknowledging the land on which those of us who are based in the Toronto area find ourselves today. We acknowledge that the land we are meeting on is a traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples, and is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Metis. We also acknowledge that Toronto is covered by Treaty thirteen with the Mississaugas of the Credit.

Before I introduce our panelists, I’ll quickly go over the agenda for the session. We’ll start with panelist introductions, and then move over to our discussion, and then leave some time at the end for audience Q and A.

We ask that you submit your questions by posting in our Q and A. Our team will be monitoring the Q and A, so feel free to post during the panel’s discussion.

For anyone needing assistance, we’ll either directly respond to any questions in the chat, or we’ll put them in the queue so that our guest speakers can address them at the end of the presentation.

This webinar is primarily meant to help Canadian startups that are interested in expanding into the UK.

Healthcare innovation is increasingly global, but entering a new healthcare system is rarely straightforward. For health ventures looking to scale internationally, the UK is emerging as a strategic expansion market, particularly for companies already operating in Canada or other publicly funded health systems.

The UK and Canada share several structural similarities nationally funded healthcare, complex procurement environments, and increasing pressure to deliver better outcomes with constrained budgets.

These parallels create a unique opportunity for ventures that have already proven value in one system to translate that success into another.

This discussion will explore the strategic case for UK expansion and examine where the UK and Canadian health care systems align, where they differ, and what those differences mean for commercialization strategies.

We’ll also unpack key considerations around regulation, procurement pathways, regional variation within the UK, and emerging policy drivers such as sustainability and carbon reduction requirements.

And so without further ado, I’m very pleased to introduce our great panelists who will be sharing their special insights on today’s topic.

First up, we have Orion, the co founder and CEO of PhenoTips.

Ryan, would you like to give a thirty second overview of what you do?

Sure. Thanks, Monscana. Pleasure being here today. Thanks so much for the opportunity.

At PhenoTips, we help genetic teams in hospitals to work faster and more effectively to ultimately improve access to genetic testing as a critical part of healthcare. My background is in computer science and bioengineering. We spun Phenotypes out of the PhD research group that I was in at Toronto, in Toronto at the University of Toronto and Sick Kids Hospital. We’re a Mars portfolio company and phenotypes is used broadly across Canada and within the NHS genomic medicine service in the UK. Looking forward to talking more about that today.

Perfect, thanks for joining. Next up we have Damian. Damian at Healthe. Io, would you like to also give an overview?

Thanks, thanks so much for having me along. So Damian Labore, Managing Director at Healthe. Io. We’re the first company in the world to turn a smartphone into a medical grade device. We’ve used that in to assess people’s kidney health in the comfort of their own home. We use it to assess wounds and see if they are deteriorating or improving.

We are scaled across the NHS. Are broadly speaking about fifty percent of the health board for the NHS and a number of community providers. We’re looking forward to speaking to you.

Thanks Damien, thanks for joining us today. Next up we have Sarah Bruce White at Innovate UK. Would you like to give an introduction Sarah?

Yes, hi, thank you very very much for having me. I work for Innovate Business Growth as a part of UK to the innovation ecosystem. So I support companies in a specific part of the UK with their growth strategy. Mainly within the life sciences sector my background is in medical devices. I scaled a medical device company. So I help companies with their commercial, financial and international strategy. So great to be here today, thank you for having me.

Thanks Sarah, thanks for joining us today. And finally we have Moody, the co founder and CEO of Clarify.

Hey, everyone. Clarify is an AI assistant that helps therapists and their clients between their sessions.

We do everything from automating the boring admin tasks that therapists hate, with the goal of freeing up their time and stress so that they can be more present in their sessions, all the way to actually helping the clients who are going to therapy in the one hundred and sixty seven hours they have between every hour of therapy session that they have.

We have about four thousand seven hundred now therapists across Canada, the US and the UK. And we’re expanding into the UK with a partnership with a UK organization that services therapists in that market.

Thanks, Modi. Okay, so to get started, just to give a little bit of a preamble on the surface, as we just mentioned, these two systems almost are identical, right? Both are publicly funded, both struggle with a massive shortage of staff and both have an aging population that needs more care than the current budget allows. But as our panelists today have found similar doesn’t mean the same.

One of our panelists has managed to scale a genetics platform across the UK. So to get this started, Orion, I’d like to ask you, you know, you’ve managed to get your software into several major regions in the UK. If you can speak a little about that, that adventure, if we can call it that. And when you first arrived, from Canada, how much of that success was due to treating the UK not as one giant payer?

Thanks. That’s kinda, yeah, it’s been, it’s certainly been an adventure.

I guess as a little bit of a preface for people who might be listening in and, you know, as a caveat to any advice I might give, like we focus on hospitals.

Those are our kind of core customers. And so this might not be relevant for everyone. But in our experience, the NHS isn’t a customer. The NHS is a health system.

The local trusts are really the entities who we work with. They’re responsible for a region. They’re the legal entity who we’re contracting with and are the people who we’re building relationships with in order to help support.

We found that doing that work with partners in the UK, they’re amazing people to work with, very accessible, very collaborative.

We’ve built those relationships largely at like trade shows that are specific to genetics through research collaborations over the years.

And so I think from that sort of experience, the advice that I would give maybe to the people who are listening in and trying to figure out how to enter would be the NHS has published relatively recently their ten year plan. Really review that.

That will allow you to speak the language that they’re responding to and listening to in terms of what are the problems that they’re facing and how are they looking to solve them.

Ultimately, your goal or our goal was and is to sort of solve that problem, not close a deal. And it’s not always a conversation about ROI. It’s often a conversation about just how do we help you solve this problem? And there’s a lot of support within the NHS to be able to do that sort of innovation work, including with outside international companies. And so we found that sort of very, very supportive environment in order to work with people.

So to follow-up a little on that, did you find that it was more beneficial for you to talk to the NHS directly? You mentioned relationship building, right?

If there’s any founders that are present here today and they’re almost debating between whether I go to the NHS directly or whether I focus on decision makers like specialists, did you find that the relationship building with the specialists, especially at the onset of, you know, your market expansion or exploration in the UK was more useful for you?

That was the strategy we took, and I think I would say to sort of go by that if to, you know, we’re working at a different company or to do that again. I think ultimately, you know, it’s about building relationships with the people who beneficiaries of the technology or the solution that you’re bringing and having them as champions internally. Just like, you know, working within the Canadian ecosystem, at least that’s been our experiences. You you when selling into hospitals and health systems, it’s all about, how do you support and empower? How do you find the champions within that institution and support and empower them for making a case for bringing your solution in?

Agreed.

Underscoring or the importance of a champion as well is not to be overstated.

Damian, I I I would like to actually even bring you into this conversation or this thread. Would you say that this experience is an outliner an outlier or is the modus operandi of, let’s say, for Canadian founders looking at all options beyond a national contract or at all options beyond relationship building with the NHS trusts?

Thanks so much. Ryan’s captured it very beautifully there. I think to point to that ten year plan, everything must align with that ten year plan. That’s the national direction of travel.

Make sure your innovation fits within that. Broadly speaking, there are three boxes you need to tick. So one is from analogue to digital, these are the kind of underpinning mantra, analogue to digital, from hospital to home and from cure to prevention. So if you can tick those three off, you’ll get a lot of support in the UK. To Orion’s point, find your find your champion. Ideally, find your clinical champion, someone that someone that’s really to gotta fight the corner for you and what I would say is the NHS is actually tremendous in terms of supporting innovation and helping it get out the gate. There are lots of support, there are lots of grants, there are health innovation networks so organisations set up to do nothing other than take innovations and help them scale for the benefit of the NHS and they can provide mentorship, they can provide sources of funding and they’ll be tremendous at doing that.

I think the NHS actually is a bit of a world leader in terms of helping those innovations reach that point. Where I think the NHS can sometimes let itself down is the subsequent scaling and sustaining that innovation within the UK. But certainly, if you’re if you’re in the at the start of that journey, you’re thinking about moving internationally and you’re looking for a geography that will support you to to start and begin scaling, the NHS is there for you.

Thank you. Can you speak to maybe even some of the challenges and how they’ve evolved from, let’s say, the earlier stages to where you are today?

Yeah, certainly. So we were very fortunate again part of that kind of receiving grants and being able to tap into support. Actually received a very large grant that enabled us to take our from a pilot state from basically a very small kind of two hundred patient cohort almost overnight we went to being able to access six and thirty five thousand patients and we were encouraged to do so and encouraged to do so over three years.

Think the lesson that we learned from that is that you can’t assume that even once you’ve got your innovation embedded that that is enough So we naturally had to bleed into a bit of a pathway approach. So you can have the best product in the world, but you you need to bring the people along with you. You need to think about the change management upfront, you need to think about the patient engagement, you need to think about how do you see that through to the ultimate outcome. In the kidney case our ultimate outcome is to have the patients that we identify essentially uptitrated onto an SGLT2 drug or an ACE or an ART and that prevents the progression of CKD. Now for us that’s beyond the remit of our tool and our product but I think naturally we’ve had to build an education element to encourage our clinicians to undertake that piece of work because that’s really where the value was derived.

I think when you are bringing products over think about how it fits in that pathway, think about what you can do upstream, think about what you can do downstream and then also think about your sustainability story. If you’re putting that product in what’s your health economic evaluation that’s going to help you maintain that environment long term? Who are the key stakeholders you need to bring along in the journey who will be your champions going forward because sometimes what can happen is that those brilliant innovations, no matter how good they are, they reach the end of their grant and they drop off a cliff because no one’s allowed for sustainable funding.

Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. I think even in terms of of planning, you know, seeing beyond the pilot, the pilot obviously is is, you know, a great win or it’s a great signal both internally and externally. But, ideally, how do you set yourself in a position where the pilot converts?

And that’s where I’d actually like to bring in Moody because you’ve taken kind of a course that’s different than, let’s say, some of the other people that are on the call or some of the other companies that are here today, you focused instead on organizations that have their own budgets, right? But they still support and are nested under the wider or broader health system, right? So for a founder watching this, why is it sometimes better to partner to an ecosystem or to a system rather than a supplier to the system itself? So maybe if you can talk about your story and how you approached entering the UK market while also seeing whether or not the NHS is a possible partner in the future? Would love to hear a bit more.

I operated from the typical software startup mentality of you have a couple months that you need to make some kind of traction on or you’re default dead. And even when you have your own funding and grants, you should kind of still operate under that assumption that you need money now.

And the quickest way we saw was not going the RFP through the Canadian or the Ontario government, even though they had a bunch of money they wanted to spend on tools like ours.

It would take maybe a few months for me to even wrap my head around this RFP, build what was needed for the RFP, communicate, wait for the deadline, then God knows how long the government takes before they respond to you with possibly a no, thanks.

We went through this once with the AI compute grant that the Canadian government announced about trying to give cloud credits to help AI companies in Canada.

Months go by, you don’t hear from them, then you hear a no with no explanation. So I knew that if we just focused on trying to attach ourselves to the government, we were probably not going to survive. So went for the smaller organizations that had pains, whether it was like staff burnout or actual time savings that managers had as objectives. But I do actually agree with a lot of what Damian said.

Even in our case, when we had pilots, we have trials with small clinics. We still need to get their clinicians to engage with our platform so that they can decide, oh, this is worth it. We’ll pay for this. So it’s actually very similar, I think, process in building the product, making sure the change management is the same.

You just have a different person that’s paying. And I found that the government pays very slowly. And I did not have the time or patience personally to deal with that until now we’re bigger. We have some more funding.

I can take our time, maybe even hire some help.

So that’s the stage where I and why I decided to go for the individual clinics.

Could you speak to what the timeline was like for you, let’s say from kind of like coffee to a signed contract? Yeah.

Okay, so my clients vary from an individual therapist. And what’s interesting about therapists like psychotherapists, psychologists, is they have sort of a contractor model where they can work for multiple clinics. They can pick up five clients from this clinic virtually, another ten from here. Maybe they have a place that they go to in person where they fill up most of their time.

So a lot of our customers were just individuals who were really sick and tired of writing their own notes.

And so our AI helped them do that.

Even like these are individual therapists that might be getting employed by a different organization or getting paid from their clinic. They decided, I want to pay thirty dollars to save my sanity.

So they put their money down and some of them pay one hundred dollars plus for a higher plan.

So in some cases, I didn’t even meet the person. They just found us through referrals, through word-of-mouth, they signed up right away.

In other cases, as most recently, we signed on a clinic in Calgary.

And that one was about a month long trial period where I spent a bit of time onboarding their team, answering questions, fixing the problems that were in our product that their practitioners saw.

And about a month later, which is now, we’re signing a contract, bringing them on for the whole year.

And so when I see something like that, I go, all right, I can do that way easier than I can manage the Ontario government that will take ten months of my time and hit me with a no, which would be devastating.

All right. And I guess akin to the experience that you had as well in the UK, but presumably it’s not a complete write off, right?

Do you imagine a world in which you can show enough value that eventually the NHS comes knocking on your door? And how are you preparing for that?

Yeah, actually, that’s kind of our strategy now. We started with how do we make our platform the easiest, best thing for an individual. We didn’t even have a team or any sort of sign in and pay for somebody. It was just you’re paying for yourself.

Sorry. If you need to figure out a way to expense this, too bad. It was really like build something that somebody, the actual end user, the practitioner would love. Because I find when you sell into these larger systems and governments, they will create RFPs that I think encompass users that will never see the product, that will never touch the product, that will maybe they just want a dashboard or whatever, but so much of the RFP is focused on that versus the end user.

In Damian’s case, like you said, the actual clinician, when you saw that engagement, it was so much better for your product and your sale.

So we built our product for the end person, and now we keep scaling it more and more for larger organizations. The UK organization we’re working with is a private business that actually sells to therapists and psychologists and things like that. They’re they’re an EHR, so they’re similar to Jane App or Owl in Canada, but they’re based in the UK. And there was a really like a timely mutual benefit here where as they’re expanding into Canada, we’re expanding into the UK, and we both fill each other’s gaps.

And so instead of saying, Okay, we’ll go through this painful process of building all these things that we don’t want to build, There’s that organization that’s already built it. We’ll just attach ourselves and do the last mile, you know, like Uber doesn’t cook your food for you. It just sends a driver to the restaurant. And so we basically said, how can we be Uber here since there’s already a bunch of restaurants?

And that’s where kind of our go to market and our product strategy has been.

Yeah, no, that’s a great point. And if I can be almost reductive or tactical here, it’s almost like there’s there’s two streams of alignment, right? One is, you know, with obviously like identifying the user and knowing kind of the distinction between the user, the payer and the buyer. And then I think to what Damian said earlier about the, you know, analog to digital hospital to home and care to prevention that is less aligned with the user, even though it has effects for the user, but more aligned with the payer, right?

And the buyer in this sense. And so being able to identify what those two streams are must be also something that’s really important. But yeah, I think it’s really interesting how you’ve kind of taken a different approach. I’d like to actually bring Sarah into this point because more broadly as a trend, are we starting to see that, right?

Are we starting to see the NHS? Are we starting to see the health system buy from companies that have proven themselves or shown that value in the private sector, private healthcare sector?

Definitely, and it’s where you can sort of build that evidence and those outcomes. Like Moody had a great example of where he sort of sped up his his market entry by partnering with with somebody to sort of get get that evidence and partnering with a company. So I think it’s really important to build you know your evidence, your outcomes, it it’s sometimes hard to generalise because it depends you know on the regulatory strategy, what you know regulations you’re bound by, what sort of type of device you are, but I think you have to build evidence, those outcomes to be able to demonstrate, to be able to get procured, and whether you’ve built that already on smaller pilots in the NHS or elsewhere overseas in a recognised market or within the private sector because there’s a lot you know to be able to demonstrate to get procured, to be able to build those relationships with the clinical champions.

I think there is a realisation as well that you know whether it’s you know the NHS wanting to work with SMEs there’s in you know there there’s a sort of a a plan been integrated. Again they’re looking at the the NHS ten year plan and moving things from sort of hospital to home and and community and working out that some of the real world evidence can also not be built within the timescales by scaling across the NHS first. So it’s different for all companies, I think you’ve got to look at the different ways that you might scale quickly, to clear Moody’s example.

Yeah, and I love that you said evidence and outcomes, right, is always gonna be really the kind of focal point.

I wanna ask though, what if you are a founder that’s in a scenario where let’s say you have that value, you’ve showed the outcomes, but the NHS trust says we love it, but we can’t pay for it. How can a founder pivot from that or adjust from hearing that there might not be the money that they’re expecting then?

I think some of that is in the, I don’t know if that question was to me or Yeah for you Sarah and Damien and for anyone else that wants to.

Yeah I I think some of that is is understanding in the first instance how you are going to be procured. Back to those clinical champions understanding where you fit in in the value chain. The NHS used to be not very good at looking at the overall cost if you were a a a difference in primary care that that affected budgets in in secondary care in the hospital stage. But actually at a a trust level and an ICB level and even to the point of NHS supply chain and big attenders, they are really trying to look at how better to manage those budgets to be able to make overall productivity gains relieve pressure off the system.

So I think if you’ve been having the conversations and they realise that there isn’t some sort of reimbursement or tariff in that particular environment, how do you then explore how it saves overall funds, who are going to be the best procurers, is there another partnership that speeds that up, there are ways to do it but it’s also in that preparation of going to a new market.

Right Damien?

Yeah I was just gonna chip in on that so if they say no there are options out there and one of my first protocols every time would be the Health Innovation Networks they’re able to They are there to support. In our case again we found a clinical area to pilot.

We then petitioned the Health Innovation Network to fund essentially our economic evaluation which they did. So there are pots of money you can tap into even if the organic money that you’re expecting from a trust isn’t immediately available. I’d also say that increasingly the NHS is thinking about different contracting forms and gain share is a word that’s coming into play a lot more with a bit more of a risk share. Can you put your money where your mouth is and say actually I’m willing to forgo payment on the basis that I’ll deliver these outcomes and at that point I get payment plus.

I get a slight bonus for taking the risk early on and I think that there’s a lot more openness to those kind of arrangements. And then finally I think there is this growing acceptance from the NHS particularly when it comes to digital that they have to ultimately they they can’t it’s not about immediate cost reduction. They have to invest in digital. And I would I would argue that one thing that we’ve been terrible at in the NHS is then decommissioning the old so I think any plan that you put forward should be about here’s what we’ll deliver, it will provide these outcomes but in doing so you can also decommission this element of care that will no longer be required.

The analogue element of care can go and that will save you x. I and I think certainly people are starting to switch on a bit more that digital can’t just be about layering on additional costs on on the existing system. It’s gotta be innovation that reduces cost and we remove the analog underneath it.

Right. Sometimes the reason for for the innovation’s existence itself. Right?

Exactly.

And so I’m I’m I’m glad you, you know, you both have touched on that because, you know, the as as as you’ve shared, you NHS has their ten year plan. With that, there’s also been a lot of push on the sustainability front. So happy to start with both you, Sarah and Damien about this. You know, I think it’s expected to take effect in a couple of weeks, but the NHS has, you know, a couple of new rules about how companies plan to reach net zero carbon emissions. This is known as their carbon reduction plan.

You know, there’s other facets to it as well, but reductively for the sake of this conversation, it is essentially how are you thinking about incorporating net zero elements as you scale and as you build, right? So this might invariably make it harder for smaller companies or smaller teams to compete. Right? You know, there’s this administrative burden of sorts that some may see it as.

If you’re a founder or even to the founders that are in this audience that have these small teams, that have these small companies, Do you see this as an administrative request that they can handle or is there potentially a reason to delay the UK launch if you are a Canadian startup?

I don’t know who you want to go first.

Either of you Sarah or Damien.

I would say don’t delay, think keep it proportionate but it’s not going away.

It’s not going away from a worldwide climate point of view, from an NHS point of view, from other healthcare systems across the world also looking at their processes, their requirements, so think keep it realistic in that if you’re going for tenders I think it’s over five million pounds that it’s much more onerous your carbon reduction plan, the tenders, but every hospital trust has a plan now, they’re expecting every supplier to demonstrate their savings in terms of the Scope one, Scope two and ultimately Scope three emissions, where it will get more complicated as you go along. So if you

start looking at that now and there are know there are free, there’s you know calculators, carbon calculators, there’s an NHS example plan, there are companies that also have tools that you can just plug those in and consonant with the the size of company you you are, but whether it’s dealing with investors or other large organisations within their supply chain, they will need you to to do it as well.

So I I would generally get your head around it as soon as possible rather than delaying, but Damien feel free to chime in.

Yeah, I’m echoing some of Sarah’s stuff. I think historically again we’ve probably been rather terrible ensuring a level playing field for SMEs in the UK.

And it I think I think it’s kind of sixty five seventy seventy percent of UK organizations are are are called SMEs are are in the SME bracket. So I’ve actually been on the SME procurement panel within the NHS which is looking at how do we reduce those barriers to entry.

You start to see things such as more cross cutting themes such as digital technology assessment criteria where it’s designed to be done once well rather than in every single geography within the UK. Back to the net zero pieces as Sarah outlined, it’s five million pounds or above to produce a plan. Underneath five million, it’s a commitment. It’s a carbon reduction commitment.

So it it’s not the barrier that you might think it is. It’s about demonstrating that you are committing to reducing your cut your carbon over a period. But you don’t have to produce that full plan until you’re over that over kind of five million pounds procurement threshold. So as Sarah says, definitely keep it in mind, definitely motorway on it, but but don’t see it as a barrier to entry into the NHS.

Yeah, and I’m glad that you made that distinction and that detail.

Sarah, I think it’s important that you said, it’s not like it’s changing anytime soon, The climate is obviously changing. And so being able to adapt to those circumstances are something worth considering.

Moody, I want to We had a lovely conversation in the pre convo around bureaucracy in Canada and the UK.

I’ll say this as somebody who went the other approach instead of trying to build for these systems and adhere to the long RFP or whatever all these regulations. Obviously, we have to adhere to regulations like PEPEDA, P HIPAA across every province and in the UK, UK GDPR. But even that was so much effort, time and money.

And it’s not just like, you know, you could do it to tick these boxes, but if you want to do it properly, you have to even modify your entire product, sometimes your actual marketing strategy. You know, you can’t all of a sudden email all your users to tell them about a partner that you have because they didn’t opt into marketing, according to UK GDPR. And this is where my gripe and problem as an entrepreneur comes directly, it conflicts with what I like about these regulations as a citizen. I want the government to protect my data, to protect us, to help us prosper.

It feels like once we’ve given our governments that duty and that responsibility, and as is with any kind of organization, not government, anything, it tends to grow in the direction you gave it.

So there’s never enough regulations. There’s never enough barriers. There’s never enough ways to be safe. There’s never enough requirements to be appealing to a group of people whose sole job is to think about that.

And I think we are in for a world of pain if we keep going down that route. Because I compare to, obviously, in the US, they don’t have, I mean, almost any regulations that are being enforced right now. That’s not ideal either.

But it’s a little bit more flexible. In countries like Dubai, they’re very quick to change regulations and say, Oh, this new technology, let’s bring it on. Let’s every hospital try it, in the UAE generally.

And what ends up happening is you have companies in these jurisdictions, in the US, in the UAE, that have a lot more cycles because they have experiments they can run. Meanwhile, you might have companies like Healthy, PhenoTips, others that when they go the route of like, Okay, let’s go to the UK government and spend all this time appealing to their process, their regulations, that’s a lot of time that you don’t get to experiment with your product being in the hands of those people.

And by the time you get there, maybe an American company has a product five times better because their city didn’t care or whatever. They just threw it in there.

I was just gonna get yeah. Maybe maybe spot on. I I think historically, you know, lot of the a lot of the innovations in the UK have been around drugs and devices have been overseen by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence. So this body that traditionally took an approach which was around long term evaluation.

They kick off an evaluation and in three, maybe five years time it reports. That’s not appropriate for a lot of the innovations today. It’s not appropriate for digital technology.

By the time certainly if you’re in a three year time frame in digital tech, you probably attrites that model five, six times over that period. Particularly in our case we did that.

There’s been a recognition of that I think within NICE and they now have a program, the national adoption program which is designed to give the same credence of evidence found in real world data to that found in traditional kind of evaluation study.

Again, I think I think we’re still stuck in in a bit of a maelstrom between the two, but but certainly direction of travel in the long term is to again, how do you remove those barriers and reduce those hurdles so that it’s much easier for innovations to get out of the gate.

And this is just to sorry, Sarah, I just want to say this, this is to my point of, in this audience, there’s many people, there’s no right way to do this. My way is not right. I’m sure healthy and phenotypes are maybe even more I don’t even know like what it sounds like you guys are even further along than us. There are different ways and different audiences.

In my case, I gave the kind of reasons why we avoided the government at our stage, but I definitely intend to go that route. Like that is the goal is to help most people and the government has that power and that distribution. It’s incredibly powerful if you get one of these partnerships or contracts. So I’m not saying it’s the wrong way.

I’m saying that for people who think in startup land, where you might not have grants or funding for years, and you have to act in weeks or months, you just cannot go the path that these governments want you to go.

And I was just going to add one thing, because you mentioned, Damien mentioned NICE, the MHRA which is also the UK’s body is working much more closely with NICE these days and there’s changes to the clinical trial system to try and speed up clinical trials, in fact sometime in April there is, I attend another webinar tomorrow but sometime in April there’s a critical date where they’re trying to reduce, you know, speed up clinical trials. I think the UK, you know, government is really, you know, focused on speeding up that as part of this NHS ten year plan. So very much so.

Brian?

Yeah, I mean I think I hear what you’re saying Moody, I think though the caveat I would say is that a product is good in the context of its market and environment too, and that is the nature in which you are selling and integrating into these clinical workflows. And I think there is a lot of regulation. A lot of that is good. Some of it ends up looking like regulatory capture.

Certainly as a startup, you have to fight against this impedance matching that happens when you’re dealing with you’re you’re selling not even just into a business, but, like, into government, basically, with these hospitals and trusts. And there’s there’s bureaucracy there. And so you that tends to induce bureaucracy within your organization to deal with that bureaucracy, and that can be really hard as a startup. But it isn’t different from selling into Canadian hospitals and health systems in our experience. The benefit of the UK is that they have, like, a overarching ten year plan, so there’s some coordination across all of them versus in a Canada. It’s separated by province. And so it’s really you have you have at least one market there that is larger than the Canadian provinces that are are at least aligned and that that simplifies things significantly at least.

And by the way, my gripe is not with the UK government. It sounds like they’re actually doing things better than our own here in Canada in some ways. I am hopeful that we will solve this, especially because it feels like the world got a kick in the ass over the past couple of years around not relying or being overly reliant on certain people and certain systems and countries and whatnot. So yeah, I’m hopeful, Orion.

Yeah, and I’m glad that you say that, right? I do agree that speed is one thing.

But you know, I think very much you could also hear a rebuttal or for some that regulation serves as guidance as well, right? So I think always not seeing regulation as let’s say a misnomer for yes, of course it’s a balancing act. Right?

But you know, sometimes regulation might be interpreted better than let’s say ambiguity or a lack of market being there.

So take it all with a grain of salt. But we are going to be soon asking some questions from the audience. But before we do that, I just want to go into a few more kind of tactical questions about like, you know, your experiences. And so, Orion, this is for you, you know, you you you got in to the UK market through a research project, right? When the research project was over, how did you stop it from becoming just an eye like just another project or a pilot that didn’t convert? What was it that it took you to to convert that?

I think I would bring this back to the and I’ll I’ll try to keep my answer short, but I think I would bring this back to relationships and champions and providing value. If you’re providing value, they don’t wanna lose you either, and they will help you navigate their system for figuring out how to keep you.

Agreed.

Yeah. And there’s the innovation funding. There are other other sources. They they have pools of funding. There’s operating. That gives you a chance to sort of demonstrate, show the proof, and then there’s, I think, a lot of reception to adopting those technologies. It can be not always easy, but if you have champions on your side and you’re providing value, then they’re your, you know, support for help.

Damien, I see that you’re I was just gonna come in and and reiterate for Ryan’s point.

So the best thing that we ever did, we found a regional clinical director. So it was responsible for one seventh I guess of the UK in terms of medical directorship we made him a total champion and I can tell you that he removed every single barrier to adoption in his patch possible. So if ever we hit up against someone who said, oh, I’m not sure or or we need to do a separate pilot or he would he would just railroad in there, say, no. I’ve given this the okay. That that champion was just so important to us and helps us scale now in.

Thank you for that.

I think that we could keep going for for for for very long. I actually have a ton more questions, but I think it’s only fair that we give an opportunity for our audience who’ve kindly submitted a couple questions. So I’ll just read them out to you.

We’ve asked that they either.

Yep. We’ve asked that they either say who it is targeted for or just more generally. If you feel like you can answer it or you want to please just feel free to unmute yourselves to the panelists. So the first question is the UK market, particularly within the NHS is often perceived as having longer decision making cycles.

What systemic factors contribute to this pace? And how can innovation partners better align with NHS governance structures to accelerate evaluation and adoption?

Hefty question. So first part of the question, what systemic factors contribute to this pace, the longer decision making cycles in the NHS?

I can with that. I mean, know, with any regulated device, you’ve got a long cycle because you’ve got to, you know, have full, you know, there’s regulation and evidence. There’s also the, you know, working out where you fit into that pathway, making sure you’ve got enough evidence that you’re better than, you know, what is already already there. Finding those champions, making sure you understand how it fits into the pathway, finding the right decision makers that can sort of sign off on that from a budget point of view and from multiple stakeholders.

So you might find that there is a solution that you know reduces pressure but it’s more expensive. So there’s a business case to be put forward about how it’s going to add value longer term. And that’s not a quick fix. There’s so many things within a government regulated environment that you’ve just got to be prepared for it to take a little bit longer.

Think hopefully that answers some of the question.

Yeah, think that I think you put it actually really well, right? It’s like, you know, if on one side you’re, you know, worried with kind of like building the product and iterating, on the other side, more so the market, right? You’re looking at kind of like, what are the benchmarks? What’s the incumbent kind of technologies that exist? Where are they at? Who are the decision makers and who are the champions? And then for myself, right, I I will build and hopefully try to match those those needs.

Orion, I see I was just gonna say, fiscal year is April to March.

You should know that and operate around that. And then you need to know basically whether you’re coming into an environment where there’s an explicit budget that you are replacing that that is coming out of or whether you’re trying to go through the process of of, like, reallocating funds from somewhere else or finding a budget and then you have to go through kind of supporting a champion to make a business case than an RFP in that whole cycle, which is long.

Next up, thank you. Next up, we have another question. What level of clinical or validation evidence is typically expected before engaging NHS partners? And how does that compare to expectations in the US?

I’ll start it off but it probably won’t be a satisfactory answer because it really depends what your innovation is, what the classification of device and what safety data you need, whether it’s based on some real world evidence or whether you need large scale data to be adopted.

So I don’t know if anybody else wants to sort of give more specific examples, I’ve helped lots of different innovators and it’s slightly different each time when I was launching devices as well, so happy to have the others.

Thanks.

I guess from our experience the UK has been, I guess we’re in a lighter regulatory regime than a lot of the people who are joining might be in, But compared to the US, I guess I would say the UK is more focused on kind of the outcome rather than the clinical or health economic piece until you get into like NICE and procurement. If you’re talking about, you know, finding champions, supporting them, and having a like a digital solution be procured locally, then it is, at least in our experience, lighter there versus the US is way more focused on the immediate quantitative components because of, I guess, the single parent nature. There’s a lot more support for talking about larger impacts and outcomes that are related to patients and healthcare.

You’re working with a lot of data, right, Corinne? So I think this is kind of a segue into another question that embeds well here. It’s how did you navigate the data privacy and kind of governance requirements, especially around like sharing patient data, right? I would say historically, NHS, but I would imagine kind of anywhere in the world, including in Canada, you know, that’s a priority.

And so is there an appetite within the NHS for privacy infrastructure that enables sharing without creating regulatory exposure?

That’s I won’t I guess so with phenotypes, we manage a lot of sensitive, you know, patient information within our system.

So all fully identifiable clinical patient records, both, you know, phenotypic and demographic and genetic.

So there are a lot of regulatory steps that we, I think, rightfully have to go through in order to offer that.

The way that we’d handled that as a scrappy system early on was we started on prem.

Have lots of thoughts about whether that was the right approach, but it allowed us to get into markets more quickly than we would have if we had to take on that full regulatory burden ourselves at the time because basically, we were providing the solution and the hospital was the one who was responsible for it. Since then, we’ve totally migrated to where we’re the the managing all the infrastructure and so then for are responsible for it but I don’t think we would have been able to take that on ourselves without either working directly with a partner who is providing a lot of that infrastructure or doing it on prem.

Right. I guess that decision comes to kind of like a trade off of speed versus size and how much you wanna take on.

Moody, for you, you mentioned the move toward larger institutional slash government contracts now that you’ve scaled. Having managed that transition in other markets, this audience member says that they’ve seen the sales challenge often become a compliance and relationship challenge.

What is the one thing you’re looking for in the partners or leaders who will lead that government expansion for Clarify?

Okay. This is such a I don’t know what the word that I’m looking for, but amazing question because it relates to what I wanted to say when I put my hand up a few minutes ago when Damian was saying the champion that he had basically unblocked the system and burdens and got them in there. And I thought like, wow, that’s amazing. And at the same time, wow, that sucks for the startups or anybody that doesn’t have these relationships, that doesn’t have these champions and is just operating on, like, here’s the product that I built and I care about these people I’m trying to help.

Sorry, one second. Something just turned on.

Well, you know what? It’s funny. I accidentally touched my little thing and my music started playing. So now I have a soundtrack behind what I’m saying to you guys.

How are you managing that transition? It’s quite it’s quite an intense like movie soundtrack. So this is kind of fitting. The transition, like we’re just beginning that.

The point is, if I knew somebody that had these relationships and partnerships that, for example, Damien had, I would hire them in a heartbeat. Anybody else, you don’t stand a chance. Because that for me to hire if we want to expand into these government organizations, because I know that the value of that relationship is so high, It’s so much higher than maybe I need somebody to start our go to market from scratch, email people, try to build these relationships from scratch. And that’s kind of equal playing field as somebody who has these relationships.

So I would just personally want to work with somebody that already has these relationships built up.

Right. And so actually, maybe I’ll ask both of you as well as Damien and Sarah, If you are a Canadian founder, that’s like at the precipice or looking very seriously at expanding to the UK, where would you like to look that they focus spending their dollars on? I know that there’s many things to consider here, right? The type of company, the stage, etcetera.

But essentially what you’re talking about is someone with a direct link to the network, right? So for example, salespeople with a direct network, whether it’s a regulatory consultant or clinical lead, which one would you suggest founders focus on, or how would they go about prioritizing between any of those?

I would can you can you hear me okay? Sorry. I know I had some technical difficulties. So I I I’d say get your paperwork in order before before you come across. So so make sure that where you have you know, if you can if you can invest in regulation to get that get that ticked off, if you can invest in getting some of the bureaucracy out of the way. I did that’s where I put the effort because that will be the that’ll be the bit that will trip you up when you hit the UK. I wouldn’t go full on with the sales team.

I’d I’d try I’d I’d try and find I think Orion’s probably got the the greatest example there where where Orion I might be getting this wrong, but I don’t think you had a huge sales team, but I think you just developed and organically built a relationship with clinical leads on the ground that then and they become the salespeople to some extent for you. So I would definitely make sure the paperwork’s all done before you start investing heavily because sales teams we all know they cost a lot.

It’s gonna take you months and months for that to build and as SMEs we don’t have much money to burn do we?

So yeah that that’s that would be my advice.

Definitely and there are some organisations that can help overseas companies, Demi mentioned the Health Innovation Networks, that they can do some work for you to then try and link you up with the you know the clinical champions, If you are raising investment or you’re funding clinical trials that is a great you know way in. The National Institute of Health Research, the NIHR in the UK has a lot of resources. I think it’s probably directed at companies that are already based you know in the UK but there will be other you know obviously once you’ve got all your you know regulatory and compliance and you know in order I would be looking at how to work best with those clinicians understanding how you’re going to fund a trial, what the cost of that trial or real world evidence might be, and you will automatically be able to engage with those clinicians during building a lot of that knowledge.

Huge.

I think.

Thank you.

Alright. Guess yeah, I guess I would say, I mean, yeah, for our journey was largely founder led sales and then we had sort of for the UK push, we had one salesperson who was really like giving those relationships the full attention. And that sort of one two dynamic worked very well. I mean, I think the advice would be is because it’s so hard to give advice for such a broad like audience as our sector because of how different the regulatory is depending on kind of what your product is.

But the question is who are your early doctors? How do you find them and how do you connect with them? For us, that was like genetics conferences basically. Genetics is a rather niche discipline in some ways.

A close knit community might be the way to put it. And so that is the framework, whether international, like whether in the UK or abroad, you run into people who are from the NHS, and that is a fantastic way for us to start building relationships.

So I think it’s for each person, it’s how do you who are your early adopters and how do you find them and connect with Thank you.

I think that is all the time that we have today. I know that there’s many more questions, but really, you know, first I would like to, extend a deep kind of gratitude and thank you to our panelists today for sharing your time with us and for sharing really kind of tactical insights. We really appreciate your willingness to share this information, but also your experiences.

And for the audience members, you know, if you’re a startup and ready to expand into to new markets and need support on, you know, how to do so and so, EDC in collaboration with Mars has launched a course called accelerating Expansion Program. So there’s more information on how to sign up that will be emailed to all participants after this session. Thank you to all of our attendees for being inquisitive. And, you know, we commend you for taking the initiative to learn as much as you can to support your entrepreneurial journey.

Your feedback is really important to us. And so following this session, you will receive a survey and we’d really appreciate response so that we can continue to build these sessions based off your needs.

And for future events and additional venture services, again, feel free to visit marsdd.com. And please go visit each of the individual websites of the organizations listed here doing really, really great things.

I’m really excited to see where you go in the future.