How Feedback PLC Built a Blue Ocean Strategy in the Crowded Healthcare Tech Market
Most founders try to disrupt regulated industries by working around constraints. But what if the real opportunity lies in embracing them? In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Thomas Oakley revealed how Feedback PLC turned medical device regulations into a powerful moat, creating their own blue ocean in healthcare technology.
Finding the Hidden Opportunity
When Thomas joined as CEO in 2019, Feedback PLC was fighting a losing battle. Their legacy medical imaging products were being overtaken by industry giants like GE, Phillips, and Siemens. As Thomas explains, “When I joined the company, it was very much in decline, looking at legacy products that didn’t have recurring revenue.”
Instead of competing head-on, Thomas saw an opportunity in their medical device certification – typically seen as a constraint that slows innovation. His insight? While many companies could build chat interfaces or integration tools, none combined these with certified medical image viewing capabilities.
Turning Regulations into Competitive Advantage
The team developed a unique approach to regulated software development. “The medical device way of developing software is to risk, assess everything that you’re doing, anticipate risk and try and remove it from the product before you ever put it into the hands of clinicians,” Thomas explains.
This created a high barrier to entry that neither big tech companies nor startups could easily overcome. “We are certainly in the UK, the only clinical collaboration platform that is certified as medical device for image display,” Thomas notes. This certification opened doors that were firmly closed to competitors.
Creating Uncontested Market Space
Rather than selling to radiologists – a market dominated by industry giants – they focused on how other clinicians use medical images. This led to Bleeper, which Thomas describes as “a clinical grade version of WhatsApp, which provides you with a secure, chatty environment that is patient specific… instead of having photos and videos, you have CT scans and MRIs, blood results and ECGs.”
This positioning unlocked entirely new opportunities. They were selected to run “the UK’s first end-to-end care pathway between GPs in primary care hospitals, in secondary care, and these new community diagnostic centers.” Why? Because they were “the only provider that had the capability to stitch the IT infrastructure together in the background and then present it in a collaboration environment.”
Scaling Through Strategic Partnerships
Their unique position enabled partnerships that further widened their moat. Working with AWS and an AI company called Cure AI, they adapted their technology for TB screening in rural India. By leveraging capabilities originally developed for veterinary imaging in fields without WiFi, they enabled “AI-powered TB screening diagnosis within about 30 seconds of an x-ray being taken anywhere in India where you had 3G connectivity.”
The Results
This blue ocean strategy has driven consistent 74% year-over-year growth for three years running, with an 89% increase in sales in their latest period. More importantly, they’ve demonstrated the ability to “reduce wait times in the NHS by 70% without needing any additional clinical staff at all.”
Looking ahead, Thomas sees their approach enabling even broader impact: “Our technology is going to become essentially a digital glue that pulls healthcare environments together and through party technologies can be deployed to a national or international healthcare audience.”
The lesson for founders? Sometimes the biggest opportunity isn’t in disrupting regulated industries, but in using those very regulations to create uncontested market space. As Thomas’s journey shows, what others see as constraints might actually be the key to building a sustainable competitive advantage.