A Doctor in your Pocket PocDoc is an early-stage, venture capital backed digital healthcare company with a founding team that has over 30 years’ experience in point-of-care diagnostics, consumer technology and healthcare. Their main mission is to help individuals make changes in their personal lives, in order to reduce the risk of health problems and diseases, and to that end they have developed an app to rapidly check and assess the health of a patient through a pinprick test.
Can you say a bit about PocDoc and what it does? PocDoc is a digital health platform which has been developed to allow anyone with a smartphone or tablet to test themselves for a range of major diseases or conditions. It works via a fingerprick of blood, and the patient then receives a full health assessment that puts those results in context and can then be offered solutions to address any health-related issues that arise. The PocDoc platform has been designed to work with their own set of proprietary, quantitative blood tests which are being developed in house and are focused on preventative disease areas, with cardiovascular disease and diabetes as a primary focus.
Does it work for other tests, such as Covid? The platform can also integrate other existing rapid tests onto it, digitise the results and provide the same health assessment and follow-on care pathways. During the Covid-19 pandemic, PocDoc adapted its technology platform and expanded its services to become a leader in offering workplace screenings for Covid-19. The PocDoc team can provide a full end to end solution, including rapid tests, healthcare staff, logistics and the PocDoc app which collects the results, provides individual Health Certificates including Fit to Fly) and offers full reporting to the employer.
How did PocDoc begin? When did the founders spot a gap in the market and how difficult (or easy!) it was to get things moving after that? Around 5 years ago one of our founders was having a discussion with their father about how hard it was to get convenient affordable preventative healthcare checks done. Their father had had his cholesterol checked by his GP and found it was elevated. Following a period of lifestyle adjustment he wanted to get his cholesterol checked again to see if it had normalised but he couldn’t find a provider to do it quickly and easily. We then designed a simple point-of-care test that would allow him to test his cholesterol at home at his convenience using his smartphone as the diagnostic reader.
PocDoc is a client of our Business Advisory team. We spoke to them to learn more about their work in the medtech, digital health and consumer technology sectors, and PocDoc, their all-in-one testing solution app.
8 | SCRUTTON BLAND | TECH BUSINESS
Made with FlippingBook Learn more on our blog