Scaling HealthTech Responsibly: Three Lessons from Our Growth Journey

Scaling a HealthTech organisation isn’t just a technology story. It’s an operational, clinical, and trust story, where every process change touches patient safety, regulatory expectations, and day-to-day experience.

At Phlo, we launched Phlo Digital Pharmacy in 2020 to deliver fast, secure, fully digital care at scale across the UK. Since then, we’ve continued to grow our ecosystem, including infrastructure that helps healthcare providers deliver connected experiences through Phlo Connect.  

Growth has been strong. We were recently recognised among the UK’s fastest-growing tech companies, with 500% year-on-year revenue growth between FY2024 and FY2025 (from £4m to £23m), driven by adoption across our digital health products (like Phlo Clinic) and continued growth in B2B digital health and infrastructure services.  

With scale comes complexity. Here are three lessons we’ve learned that matter for any organisation building and scaling regulated healthcare services — and how we’ve kept patient care at the centre throughout.

‍

Lesson 1: Patient safety is the product — build governance into every workflow

‍

The healthtech industry has grown rapidly, and regulators have been clear: innovation must be matched by robust safeguards. Online models can improve access and convenience, but they also introduce patient safety risks if clinical controls and verification processes don’t scale at the same pace as demand.  

What we learned:
You can’t bolt safety on later. When volume grows, small gaps become systemic risks, and the “edge cases” become everyday cases.

What this looks like in practice

• Clinical appropriateness and identity checks that care at scale: Strong assurance and decisioning processes help ensure the right patient receives the right medicine, with the right counselling and escalation routes when needed.

• Standardised, auditable pathways: When services expand, consistency becomes a safety tool ensuring that high-quality care is repeatable and measurable.

• Regulatory readiness as a continuous state: Government and regulatory scrutiny of online pharmacies has been rising, with patient safety and safeguards a key theme. The lesson is simple: build systems that make compliance easier, not harder.

How this keeps care at the heart of what we do
Trust is a clinical outcome. Patients don’t only judge speed, they judge confidence, clarity, and whether they feel safe and supported. Scaling safely is how you earn that trust at every stage of the journey.

‍

Lesson 2: Operational excellence is clinical excellence — logistics and supply shape outcomes

‍

In pharmacy, “operations” isn’t a back-office function. It directly affects adherence, continuity of care, and patient anxiety, especially when people are waiting on essential medicines.

We started with a clear view of the real-world pain points: queues, stock shortages, and restricted opening hours aren’t just inconveniences — they can be barriers to better healthcare.  

What we learned:
If you’re scaling a digital health organisation, your operational model must be designed for both reliability and resilience. It must withstand demand spikes without compromising safety or service quality.

The scaling challenges are real

• Last-mile delivery complexity: Direct-to-patient models bring stringent requirements around timing, handling, and quality, especially for sensitive medications.  

• Manual processes don’t scale: Healthcare delivery services that grow quickly often discover they’ve created labour-intensive workflows that aren’t sustainable, prompting the need to streamline and automate repetitive steps while protecting safety controls.  

• Stock availability and substitution pressures: As demand changes, supply chain pressures can impact fulfilment timelines and patient communications, which can undermine confidence if not managed transparently.

What “patient-first operations” means

• Designing for predictable delivery and proactive communication (because uncertainty is stressful when you’re waiting on medicine).

• Building resilient processes that reduce avoidable delays, while maintaining safety checks and pharmacist oversight.

• Automating the repetitive, not the responsible: The goal isn’t to remove clinical judgement — it’s to give clinicians and pharmacy teams more time for the moments that truly need them.

‍

Lesson 3: Care at scale comes from ecosystems — build infrastructure that partners can trust

‍

The next phase of healthtech isn’t a single “app.” It’s a connected ecosystem: prescribing, clinical workflows, pharmacy fulfilment, patient communications, and service performance, all working together seamlessly.

What we learned:
To scale impact, you need to scale integration securely, compliantly, and in a way that makes partners better, not burdened.

This is why we’ve invested in enabling infrastructure and partnerships that help more clinicians and patients access the benefits of digital health services. And it’s why our growth has been tied to building a scalable digital ecosystem that connects patients, clinicians and partners.  

The hard part of scaling through partnerships

• Different partner models, different risk profiles: Providers and brands have varied clinical pathways, patient populations, and governance requirements.

• Interoperability and security expectations: Integration isn’t just “connecting systems”, it’s establishing trusted exchange of information with strong controls, monitoring, and auditability.

• Maintaining patient experience across handoffs: When multiple services contribute to a single patient journey, consistency and clarity matter even more.

What works

• API-driven, standards-aligned infrastructure that reduces time-to-launch and keeps workflows safe and auditable.

• Clear accountability across the pathway: Patients should never feel like they’re being passed around. Partners should feel confident about who does what, when, and why.

• Evidence-led iteration: Scale is not a one-time build. It’s continuous improvement using operational and clinical insight to refine journeys without breaking trust.

‍

The takeaway: growth is only meaningful if care improves with it

‍

We’re proud of the momentum we’ve achieved, including significant revenue growth and investment that supports scaling operations and partnerships. But the real measure of success is when care at scale is more accessible, more reliable, and more human.

The three lessons are simple. They apply to every regulated healthcare service aiming to grow responsibly:

1. Patient safety is the product. Governance must scale with demand.  

2. Operations are clinical. Reliability, communication, and resilience shape outcomes.  

3. Ecosystems win. Trusted infrastructure and partnerships unlock sustainable impact.  

If you’re building connected healthcare services and want to scale digital capabilities without compromising patient care, we’d love to collaborate.

‍

About Phlo Connect

‍

Phlo Connect is the digital healthcare infrastructure platform from Phlo Technologies. We help healthcare providers and innovators deliver safe, compliant, and scalable digital care through our API-first prescribing and pharmacy fulfilment technology.