Backing Scan.com: Enabling Imaging-as-a-Service for Digital Health
TL;DR: Scan.com has rapidly emerged as the UK’s leading private medical imaging platform, now integrating with over 200 imaging centres. With these integrations, Scan.com is uniquely positioned to become the diagnostic infrastructure layer for Digital Health, enabling better supply visibility, pricing transparency, and streamlining antiquated workflow. *First published June 2022*
Hustle Meets Healthcare
Scan.com started as a passion project in 2017 when Jasper Nissim, a qualified Oestopath, sort to remedy the daily friction he experienced with accessing medical imaging and its inefficient patient referral workflows. Initially, Jasper set out to aggregate imaging supply in Nottingham, solving the problems of his own clinical practice. And so, the next year was spent building an MVP offering access directly to patients.
Recognising local traction, Charlie and Oliver were brought in as co-founders part-time in 2019/2020 to start building out a scalable product that could launch nationally.
Charlie Bullock, now CEO, had previously founded and exited Kaampus. He was part of the senior strategy team at Pollen and also had a short stint at Deliveroo helping them launch in Worcester and Chelmsford. For his sins, he also has an ACA.
Oliver Knight, now COO, was previously a Managing Director at Rocket Internet-backed Helpling, becoming the youngest ever Rocket Internet country lead. Oliver began his career in M&A at Rothschilds, explaining his scrupulous attention to detail.
Despite joining Scan.com as a side hustle, they quickly proved to be a formidable duo, bootstrapping the platform to over £1m in annual platform revenue. They went full-time in Q3'21, preceding their first institutional funding round of £2.5m led by YZR & Oxford Capital with participation from notable investment angels behind companies such as Pipe, Monzo and Bupa.
These origins have assembled a team with a strong mix of industry and product experience. Oliver and Charlie are impressive — highly driven and focused on building product quickly. Jasper’s clinical background is highly complementary and key in guiding their energies with the patient journey and clinician front of mind.
We are excited to be backing this team in the latest investment from Triple Point Ventures. We are leading in a £2.2m round alongside Plug and Play Ventures, StartUp Health and existing investor YZR.
Why Imaging?
Politics aside, the NHS backlog has created a need to provide alternative options to avoid exacerbating health issues. Unsurprisingly, demand for private healthcare in the UK has increased, with self-pay admissions up 39% between 2019–21.
With 1 in 4 NHS patients waiting longer than six weeks for scans, the imaging space is particularly open to disruption. But, patients sourcing their own scans, at what is typically a time of distress, leaves them vulnerable to price gouging, fragmented care delivery, and a high level of administrative burden. In the US for instance, the price of routine imaging services can vary almost 50-fold. Sigh.
New solutions must have ease of access, price transparency, and patient experience at their core.
However, traditional Radiology data workflows have been extremely antiquated, relying on images stored on CDs, reports sent through fax and appointments made directly by scheduling assistants.
While there has been some push towards digitisation with the adoption of PACS and RIS systems, these are not yet based on open standards and so information is often siloed to single hospitals/trusts or subject to incompatibility due to adoption of multiple vendors.
For example, both the East Midlands and Yorkshire have their own separate PACS networks, facilitated by different providers
The US has a similar problem, with 15–20 different RIS systems being used by imaging providers
Businesses (health insurers, physio clinics, telehealth etc.) referring patients into these systems face the same issues as they look to optimise for both cost and patient outcome. Given orchestrating imaging is usually not core to their business, the incentive to create and manage multiple different contracts with imaging providers is understandably lacking. Take a private medical insurer, currently, they have no simple solution to ensure a customer can self-serve for the best value imaging via their plan.
And Hold Still Please
At its core, Scan.com dramatically speeds up booking and receiving results for medical imaging — think MRI, CT, X-Ray. The platform originated as a D2C marketplace, with patients accessing imaging via its online booking system and receiving a referral, scan, and results in just one week (1/3 of the NHS average).
The platform has evolved to cater to B2B demand, including a referral portal and proprietary API, through which consultants, clinicians and digital health providers can easily refer their patients. Here we see a particularly exciting opportunity. By fitting seamlessly into customers’ existing workflows, Scan.com removes layers of admin that healthcare professionals previously faced and unlocks the capability to embed new services with just a snippet of code.
This is all possible by directly integrating with the existing software stack of imaging centres (PACS, RIS). With a range of vendors and an absence of common standards this is no mean feat, but essential to enabling real-time availability, visibility on pricing and a unified patient experience.
In the last year, Scan.com has rapidly ascended to become the UK’s leading private medical imaging platform facilitating 10k+ scans and now integrating with over 200 imaging centres. They have also cemented their B2B proposition, building on relationships with the likes of Aviva by agreeing partnerships with leading digital health providers Rehab Guru, Medbelle, Klarity and Mindstep.
Not content with success in the UK, Scan.com have recently launched internationally, signing supply-side agreements with Medneo in Germany, and 35 imaging centers in Atlanta, Georgia — their launch city.
Digital Health Infrastructure
A well-documented trend in the Fintech space has been the development of enabling infrastructure, aiming to reduce barriers to entry for new innovators looking to build.
In Digital Health we start to see a similar pattern, whether it be telehealth (Knok, Wheel, Babylon), accessing patient data (EMIS, HumanAPI) or building compliant software (Scarlet, Vanta). Within this wave, a new vertical has emerged: Diagnostics-as-a-service (“DaaS”).
DaaS has attracted several players on both sides of the Atlantic, but to date has mainly focused on white labelled, at-home, In-Vitro testing. We believe there are opportunities to enable diagnostic access in a host of other modalities, whether that be imaging like Scan.com, aggregating wearables data like Terra or creating new embeddable digital biomarkers like Thymia.
We are excited to be partnering with Charlie, Oliver, Jasper and the whole Scan.com team as they aim to define imaging-as-a-service, globally!
If you’re a founder building digital health infrastructure, solutions I’d love to connect to hear your vision for the future. You can connect me directly on jamie.tomalin@triplepoint.co.uk or via LinkedIn & Twitter.
PACS = Picture Archive and Communication System. Used by Radiology professionals to retrieve and display images in multiple modalities (MRI, CT, Ultrasound etc.). Built to replace traditional methods involving manual file management (e.g. film jackets, CDs)
RIS = Radiology Information System. Facilitates electronic management for imaging departments, enabling storage, manipulation, and sharing of patient radiological data and imagery. Can be used in conjunction with a Hospital Information System and/or PACS.