S2 011: Matthew Beatty. Building a digital surgical clinic & health coaching for surgical patients pre- and post-op. 📲🏥🫁

The Healthtech VC

Originally a doctor, Matthew Beatty was always drawn to the world of entrepreneurship, founding his first company in property technology (proptech). He then became an operator in the healthtech world by joining Huma, then called Medopad. Matt was the clinical lead of Huma’s commercial team.

Sapien are a digital clinic run via a mobile app which helps patients to prepare for surgery by optimising their physical and mental health. They also provide post-operative support which enables reduced complication rates and improved patient experience and outcomes. 10million operations are carried out each year in the NHS alone. Sapien’s health coaching approach involves the patient in the decision-making process and gets them to engage more and have ownership of their health. Sapein are consciously working to improve the health coaching aspect with continuous iterative improvement based on both qualitative and quantitative feedback.

We touch on the surgical market and peri-operative space and note that most innovation is happening on the surgeon or medtech side, with less innovation happening at the level of the patient. However, with the pandemic causing huge surgical backlogs, innovation is needed across the surgical value chain. Matt provides tips for working with the NHS, disucsses Sapien’s experience of Amazon’s AWS digital health accelerator and explains his process for writing some of the best and most regular investor updates that I receive.