PocDoc’s mission is to help people detect and prevent chronic diseases easily.
As a 15-year-old, Steve Roest decided to spend eight weeks in Germany to live with a family that spoke no English. While there, he also learned to fly a plane “under dubious circumstances” and later returned to the UK fluent in German.
Ten years later he was made commercial director of global ticketing platform Viagogo and put his language skills to good use to scale its German operations with football’s Bundesliga.
“I really like hard problems to solve,” says Roest. “I believe in enforced humility, where you put yourself into a new situation that’s complex and you’re forced to learn in a really humble way. That’s been my experience in my whole leadership career where I’ve been out of my depth but tried to learn quickly.”
Roest has taken this approach into his latest venture with PocDoc, a UK-leading digital health diagnostics start-up, where he is co-founder and CEO and the leadership theme continues. “There are few things harder in start-up life than building complex medical devices from scratch,” he explains.
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“We were told on many occasions that it would be very difficult or borderline impossible. But we didn’t consider ourselves to be the smartest people in the room [as we sought advice].”
The British-born digital diagnostics company and its ‘healthy heart check’, which costs £19.99, now aims to revolutionise the way people test for cardiovascular diseases.
The at-home, finger-prick test delivers a full cholesterol profile, BMI score, calculates heart age, and provides a ten-year risk assessment for heart attacks or strokes. The results are processed in 10 minutes and appear instantly, with any problems shared directly with a GP via the NHS app.
Steve Roest has led PocDoc from the outset to become one of the UK’s fastest growing health-tech start-ups.
Based in Cambridge, PocDoc started from a laboratory in early 2020 – the diagnostics provider had also tested for polio in Pakistan – while its heart checker took under three years to build, with 20 scientists and software engineers at the helm. With 40 staff today, PocDoc can now produce 3m units annually from its UK manufacturing facility.
The vision was to focus on screening large volumes of people faster and more affordably than trying to get potential patients into a GP surgery which, says Roest, has limitations.
He had entered into the business insistent on getting to the nub of the issue for the customer: the healthcare system. “It doesn’t need a new test per se, it needs a new way to affordably stop people having strokes, heart attacks, developing Type 2 diabetes and developing chronic kidney disease,” says Roest.
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There was also a personal pull. When he was 14, Roest’s father had a stroke due to an undiagnosed cardiovascular disease which had a catastrophic effect on his family. “It had a huge impact on me on the fragility of life,” he says. “It created this drive to solve things today rather than wait for tomorrow.”
His father, Jerry, had previously ran Compuserve as VP Europe and, following his stroke recovery, he then became song identifier Shazam’s first CEO.
Roest junior, who had studied German and linguistics at Oxford University, scaled to 80 markets worldwide over a decade at Viagogo. He left as the company crossed the $2bn (£1.5bn) ticket line. “It gave me an incredible perspective when we started PocDoc,” he says.
One of the three PocDoc co-founders is also his wife, Kiran, a life sciences specialist. She had been working with a colleague highly-cited in the point-of-care testing space, Dr Vladimir Gubala, who was also writing a research paper around using smartphone tech with quantitative blood testing.
The finger-prick test delivers a medical grade full cholesterol profile in under 10 minutes.
With his venture tech entrepreneurship, Roest mentioned to the pair that either the research paper was published or a business case could be made.
Five years on – with PocDoc having raised £10m investment – Roest cites stories of PocDoc’s work in the North East and Yorkshire with communities who aren’t able or willing to access GP care.
“We are finding a high percentage of people that are at serious risk of having heart attack or stroke and getting them into treatment,” he says. “There was a 21% increase in prescribed medication as a result of the programmes we have been involved in.”
The firm has also partnered with women’s groups as a way of screening in community centres in a manner they not only feel comfortable with but who had also been previously unknown to the healthcare system.
Meanwhile, in the Cambridge area, PocDoc had approached serial non-responders via the local NHS system. A single text message was sent out to multiple thousands for a health heart check at home with an 80% uptake within 48 hours.
“It’s not that they didn’t want to take care of their health, there previously wasn’t an effective, usable product that they could conveniently interact with,” admits Roest, who also hosts the HealthTech hour, Europe’s largest health tech podcast.
PocDoc is a British-born digital diagnostics company based in Cambridge.
In May, the British Heart Foundation warned that the UK’s heart health has declined more quickly at the start of the 2020s than in any other decade for over 50 years.
It is one of the reasons why PocDoc has teamed up with high street chain Superdrug to make more under-40s aware of their health risks. Roest says that over half of this age category PocDoc screened have a heart age that is five years older than their real age. “This isn’t just an older person’s issue anymore,” adds Roest.
PocDoc now views the area of its prevention as a $100bn market globally, with the British firm hoping to make a sizable revenue dent into that figure over the next three years.
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Roest anticipates exporting to 10 international markets by the end of the year and a US launch in late 2026. With a multi seven-year figure turnover, PocDoc is on course for half a million orders since launch.
In effect, it is now the default product both in the healthcare system for running community workplace and home screenings, as well as being the No.1 diagnostic product on the UK high street, outside of COVID and pregnancy.
“I’m a good news bearer and don’t believe in moaning,” adds Roest. “The NHS gets moaned at by everybody but we have been the opposite of that and are bringing good news to the table.”
The best advice
My father told me: ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down’. He started saying it during the dotcom crash and it became a motto. The only definite way you lose is if you quit.
Giving back
The Last Friday Club involves me giving up my time on the last Friday of every month for free, predominantly helping people in the health tech, start-up and clinical space. I am doing that because I wish someone had done it during my entrepreneurial career.
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