The Birth of Inference Clinical

A Personal Beginning

Over the past year, I've been through several operations and long recovery periods. During one particularly challenging stay, I witnessed something that changed my perspective entirely: the extraordinary dedication of NHS staff working within systems that often worked against them.

I watched nurses juggling paper forms with digital systems that didn't talk to each other. I saw doctors making critical decisions with incomplete information because data was trapped in silos. Most strikingly, I observed how innovative solutions—ones that could genuinely help—sat on shelves because the path to safe deployment was too complex, too expensive, or too slow.

The Innovation Paradox

The NHS has no shortage of brilliant ideas. Walk into any trust and you'll find clinicians who've identified exactly what would make their service better. Visit any health tech meetup and you'll meet innovators with solutions that could transform care. Yet somehow, these two worlds struggle to connect.

The problem isn't capability or intention. It's infrastructure.

Why Clinical Safety Matters

During my recovery, I became acutely aware of how every small failure in a clinical system can cascade. A delayed alert. An unshared test result. A medication interaction missed because systems don't communicate. These aren't just technical problems—they're human problems with real consequences.

Clinical safety isn't bureaucracy. It's the foundation that allows innovation to flourish. When done right, it doesn't slow innovation down—it accelerates it by creating trusted pathways for rapid deployment.

The Three Pillars

This experience crystallized into three core convictions that became Inference Clinical:

1. Safety as Infrastructure

DCB CoLab emerged from watching trusts repeatedly solve the same safety challenges in isolation. Why should every trust build their own clinical safety framework when we could create shared infrastructure? Like cloud computing transformed IT, shared safety services can transform healthcare innovation.

2. Community-Powered Innovation

HealthFoundry addresses the disconnect between local NHS needs and innovation capacity. The best solutions often come from those closest to the problem. By matching community needs with local innovators, we can build solutions that actually get adopted because they're designed with and for the people who'll use them.

3. Prevention Through Technology

SteadyTrace represents our belief that consumer technology, properly validated, can deliver clinical-grade insights. My own recovery was aided by wearable devices that caught issues before they became crises. This shouldn't be exceptional—it should be standard.

Building for the Real NHS

Inference Clinical isn't built on theory. It's built on lived experience—as a patient, as a technologist, and as someone who's seen both the challenges and the incredible potential of our health service.

We're not here to 'disrupt' the NHS. We're here to support it. To build the boring but essential infrastructure that lets innovation happen safely. To create the connections that turn good ideas into deployed solutions. To prove that clinical safety and rapid innovation aren't opposites—they're partners.

The Path Forward

The NHS doesn't need more pilots that never scale. It doesn't need more proof-of-concepts that prove nothing. It needs practical infrastructure that makes the path from idea to implementation clear, safe, and fast.

That's what we're building. Not because it's profitable (though sustainability matters), but because it's necessary. Because every day that innovation is delayed is a day that patients and clinicians struggle with problems we know how to solve.

Join Us

This isn't a journey we can make alone. We need NHS trusts willing to pioneer shared safety infrastructure. We need innovators ready to build with rather than for the NHS. We need clinicians who'll tell us when we're getting it wrong and patients who'll remind us why it matters.

Inference Clinical exists because the NHS gave me my life back. This is how I'm paying it forward—by building the infrastructure that lets others do the same.

Ready to accelerate safe innovation in the NHS? Let's build the future of healthcare together.