Push Doctor: Scaling a Digital Marketplace

That was my next question. How do you compare approaching restaurants as opposed to approaching doctors?

To every individual in the UK, the NHS is something very personal. First of all, as a Brit, it’s our NHS. We are proud of the NHS. We’re very passionate about it. But then everybody has had some form of an experience. It’s either been a really, really great experience or a really, really bad experience. Some grievances, some deaths. The NHS has impacted our lives, in one way or another.

Where we have been, historically, in the past couple of years, the NHS has always been in-person care, face to face care. The moment you talk about digitalization and technology, a doctor would say, “I’ve got to see that patient face to face. I can’t consult them over the phone or video. I just need to feel it.” That’s the first challenge we had, when we tried to build Push Doctor. Doctors weren’t ready. At the same time, the regulator wasn’t ready. CQC, they were very much, “Can you have a consultation over a video and diagnose safely and give them the right medication?” When we first launched Push Doctor, we launched it as an NHS product. The NHS, at that time, said, look, let’s trial it out and let’s see if it works. From their perspective, the doctors aren’t quite ready for it. If the CQC are not giving it safety approval, they’re not going to respond as well.

So we sat back and said, how do we move the market? That’s when we moved to become a private platform. If we build this privately and we can show the NHS that this is something that consumers love and it’s convenient. Let’s be frank about it, it takes two to three weeks to see a GP. You’ve got to phone at 8:00-8:30am; you might get through, you might not. It needs some updating. We said, how about we drive that demand so that doctors can get comfortable, patients can get comfortable, the NHS can get comfortable and the regulator can get comfortable. If we can do all four of those things, then we’re onto a winner. But the first customer, per se, was our doctors.

It took us a couple of years but, essentially, through our onboarding and through our training, they did get comfortable with it. That helped move the market so, where we were, in 2018-2019, we had a Health Secretary, in Matt Hancock, coming to say, look, digital technology is at the forefront now, it’s the focus. There is a new 10-year plan, focusing on digitalization and technology. So we really helped that move. But it only came through a lot of talking. We learnt a lot from our doctors, too, on how we become patient first and safe, as well. Now, working with the NHS and working with the CQC, we’ve done it together.

It’s interesting how you said that you have a longer onboarding process, because of the market that you’re in. You’re in healthcare; you need to understand the customer and the job you’re doing. As you said, with food, if it’s late, they’re angry but they can get something else. If you don’t get the care you need, it’s a big issue.

And it’s your bread and butter. When we signed a restaurant, for example, they know how to make food and they know how to deliver it. The beauty world, they know how to do treatments. A customer comes to you and you know how to do it. In healthcare, they didn’t know how to do digital consultations. Even today, when we’re onboarding doctors, we’re teaching them digital consultations. We’re teaching them best practice. This is what you should look out for; this is what you shouldn’t look out for. This is how you should engage with the customer. These are the customer’s expectations. It is actually a skill. We’re talking to the RCGP, the Royal College of General Practitioners, about creating a course for all future GPs on digital consultations.

You’ve got doctors who go through lengthy, 10 year or so qualifications. Then they are expected to do this diagnosis, that diagnosis, that consultation, this consultation, in person, on the phone, digital. Actually, the digital part of it, they’re expected to figure out; there’s no course there. What we want to do is, we want to bring that course into the NHS and say, look, we’ve done this for six years now, we’ve got a model which works extremely well. When we did our private platform, we were the largest provider of digital consultations in Europe. We now serve 4.5 million patients in the NHS. We know what we’re doing and we want to bring that and spread it out. But again, it’s moving that market.