Before I took a leap into healthcare technology, I spent years at Microsoft helping software entrepreneurs get their ideas off the ground. In practical terms, my job was to take people with a sharp insight into a real problem or market gap, and guide them on the infrastructure, tools and support to turn that idea into reality.
This experience nurturing entrepreneurial spirit left a profound mark and is the inspiration for Salutare. At Salutare we provide a practical, streamlined software to help clinicians unleash their entrepreneurial spirit and overcome the limitations they face every day in NHS. That means they could create pathways to provide better patient care based on real-life medical practice.
The NHS has many brilliant, motivated clinicians who have spent careers at the sharp end of patient care and who see the system’s inefficiencies. They understand the unmet needs, and many of them have already worked out exactly what a better pathway would look like.
Launching Better Healthcare
Whether it’s a consultant cardiologist who knows that a same-day diagnostic pathway would keep dozens of patients per month out of the emergency department, an oncologist who can articulate, down to the week, how much earlier a stage 1 diagnosis saves the system compared with a stage 4, or a GP who has quietly redesigned the entire frailty pathway in his head, tested bits of it informally, and seen it work, their ideas make them potential clinician-founders. What is missing is a structure to turn their insight and motivation into something concrete.
In the tech startup world, people like this would be supported with a platform, investors, safe sandboxes to experiment. They could go live and iterating within weeks. In the NHS, however, they must wait months (or even years!), for the IT procurement cycle to slowly grind forward, with failed integrations and lengthy approval mechanisms. All the while, the problem they identified gets worse every day.
None of these clinicians lack the idea or the entrepreneurial enthusiasm to put it into action. What they lack is a way to get their solutions live fast and without an entire IT team’s intervention.
A Double Hurdle
Experience suggests that clinician-founders are consistently blocked by two specific hurdles, and until we fix both, we will continue to waste some of the most valuable thinking in the health system. These are data visibility and lack of a practical route from ideation to go-live.
The data situation is particularly dire: a senior clinician today typically cannot see their patient cohort in a single, consolidated view. How many patients are currently on their pathway? How long has each one been waiting at each stage? Which patients are deteriorating, and which are ready to be stepped down? Who has fallen through a gap in the referral process? This information exists in the EPR, pathology, radiology systems that a trust already operates but its usefulness is massively diminished due to fragmentation. This data is often inaccessible without a data team request and is never presented in a 360° view that could allow full patient and cohort visibility. At the moment clinicians can’t spot trends, gaps or see upcoming risk because they simply do not have the tools to render their data legible at that level.
The second major hurdle is the lack of a practical route from idea to live service. Every new clinic, pathway or service currently requires months of IT projects, integrations that frequently fail or arrive over-budget, procurement processes designed for large-scale infrastructure change, and significant manual administration before a single patient benefits. Good ideas stall. Clinicians become frustrated. Hospitals miss opportunities to improve care and, frankly, to generate the income that funds that care. The system that was built to serve patients ends up serving its own complexity instead.
Clinic As A Service: a Shopify for Medicine
In the startup world, a founder who wants to open a store does not need to build payment infrastructure, a logistics network, or a custom inventory system from scratch. They use Shopify, or a platform like it, and they configure what they need from components that already work. Because the hard engineering has already been done, the founder can focus on their idea. Healthcare needs an equivalent that frees clinical entrepreneurs from the shackles of centralized IT procurement cycles and implementations.
A Clinic as a Service software could provide a single environment where a clinician or service manager can assemble a new digital clinic from configurable building blocks. Referrals, questionnaires, clinical ordering, diagnostics, MDTs, patient communications, follow-up protocols and analytics all connect directly into the EPR, pathology and radiology systems the trust already has, a software that makes all that data visible at the same time provides visibility.
The consultant cardiologist can create their same-day diagnostic service, set the referral criteria, configure the follow-up communications and define the outcome metrics they want to track. The clinician who spotted the gap can build the pathway themselves in minutes, providing patients with the care they need. If the benefits are really important, it can even be rolled out across a Trust benefitting even more patients.
Frameworks for Successful Launches
The framework that helps startups move from insight to operation at pace has some necessary features such as offering the ability to design a new service quickly, without depending on a team of developers or a multi-month IT project. In a Clinic as a Service model, a clinician defines the pathway, selects the components, and sets the configuration. Once the service is live, it needs to run consistently and efficiently without generating unsustainable administrative burden on the clinical team. Automated referral routing, patient communications, and workflow triggers take the onus of manual updating and transferring of data off clinical teams.
A good founder does not simply launch and move on, they watch the numbers, identify issues, and improve the product continuously. Thanks to all round visibility, a clinician running a Clinic as a Service has the same opportunity to finally see how the pathway is performing across every patient: where the delays are, what the outcomes look like, which parts of the service are over capacity and which are underused.
Finally, for the success of single pilots to replicate and spread, a clinical service designed in one Trust should become available as a template that can be deployed across multiple sites without repeating the full build process. Standardisation, which is currently almost impossible, should become a configuration choice.
The Case for Acting Now
Healthcare demands new pathways faster than providers can create software. The gap between what the system needs to do and what its technology allows is widening. The cost hits patients and staff in the form of delayed diagnoses, avoidable admissions and clinicians who burn out from fighting infrastructure rather than treating patients.
Entrepreneurial energy is sitting in consultant offices and GP practices across the country, waiting for a suitable outlet. What is needed is not IT tenders, but access to a system that provides tools they need to create new solutions fast, safely, and at scale. Time for the NHS tapped into this unrealized potential and started to benefit from the entrepreneurial ingeniousness of its world-class clinical staff.
