My route into digital health was not a straight line, and I think that has become one of its strengths.
I began in frontline care as a Healthcare Assistant. I worked across acute stroke, Covid support and other hospital settings while studying medicine. The job taught me to arrive in unfamiliar teams, understand what mattered quickly and keep care moving under pressure. It also made the gap between a process on paper and a process on a ward impossible to ignore.
That experience still shapes how I work. When a new tool is introduced into a clinical service, I do not only see its features. I think about the clinician with six other priorities, the patient who may not feel confident using an app, the local protocol that changes the route through a workflow, and the small technical issue that can drain trust from the whole idea.
Discovering service improvement
I moved into research at a specialist Mood Disorder Clinic under the NHS Mental Health Mission. The role focused on access, pathway improvement and operational delivery for people living with difficult-to-treat depression.
The work showed me that service improvement could be very practical. We designed a secure self-referral route, improved patient communication and built clearer reporting. The new access pathway contributed to a 300% increase in referrals, while appointment allocation fell to under seven days.
What interested me most was not the technology by itself. It was the way a thoughtfully designed digital route could remove uncertainty for patients and reduce avoidable work for a clinical team.
Moving into industry
That experience led to an industry secondment with CareLoop Health, supporting implementation in an Early Intervention in Psychosis service. I joined CareLoop part-time alongside my NHS role and later moved into the company full-time.
CareLoop was an early-stage team, so the boundaries between functions were deliberately thin. Implementation led into user research. User feedback led into product discussions. A live-service issue led into regression testing. Training led into better demo data, clearer support materials and changes to the operating model.
I found that I enjoyed working at that intersection. My role was not to be the most technical person in the room. It was to connect the people who understood the clinical pathway, the people building the product and the people responsible for making the service work every day.
What clinical experience contributes
People moving from clinical work into industry sometimes underestimate what they already know. Frontline experience creates an instinct for context: where responsibility really sits, why a seemingly simple task is difficult, how trust is built and what happens when a workflow fails at 4:45 on a Friday.
That knowledge is valuable in product and implementation work. It helps teams ask better questions:
- Does this fit the way care is actually delivered?
- Who owns the next action when an alert appears?
- What happens when the intended user has no time, confidence or access?
- Which part of the journey needs a product change, and which part needs a different service model?
- How will we know whether adoption is real rather than simply reported?
My advice to anyone considering a similar move is to explore it gradually. A secondment, fellowship, research partnership or implementation project can give you a view of the work without asking you to discard your existing identity.
Moving into industry did not mean leaving patient care behind. It gave me another way to help: working on tools and services that can reach more people without forgetting what an NHS shift actually feels like.