Dr. Debbie Wake, CEO and co-founder of MyWay Digital Health, spoke to us about the healthtech scaleup she co-founded four years ago. MyWay wants to make real-world impact by improving the lives of people with diabetes. We spoke to Debbie about how they’re doing this, their journey so far and their experiences connecting their ideas to the world with the support of the AI Accelerator, the University of Edinburgh and the DDE programme.
As clinician academics, for many years my Co-founder and I had been working on a national diabetes platform for Scotland, supported by Scottish Government and NHS teams, to help improve people’s ability to self-manage their diabetes. Once this platform was being used across Scotland, it showed benefits for the health service in cost savings, and we gained a lot of attention from outside Scotland - from people who wanted to develop something similar. This led to us spinning-out.
Our vision is to improve the lives of people living with diabetes globally, through affordable, low-cost, scalable data-driven solutions. Impact and scale are at the heart of what we do - how many lives can we touch and improve through our products?
We use both self-collected data and data from electronic health records, so it’s wide ranging. There’s a lot of health record data that’s important for us to know as it allows us to tailor advice and treatments. Using data to enable personalised, highly-tailored but automated advice, has fast become the USP of MyWay.
For me, it’s always been, how can we reach the most number of people? And I quickly came to the realisation that technology was the way to do this at scale.
It’s about lives touched. We’ve had half a million people access our resources and tens of thousands using our platform regionally. In terms of growth, we now employ about 30 people, and turnover is hitting just below two million pounds this year. All this is important, but we want impact for end-users to remain at the heart of what we do.
Data and AI are increasingly core for us. I’ve been blown away by the support we’ve received through the AI Accelerator. It is truly comprehensive - it’s not just about data, it’s the full business development package. It’s helped shape me from a clinical academic to an entrepreneur.
We’re incredibly lucky in Scotland because we have such a great entrepreneurial ecosystem. To me, Edinburgh has all the building blocks to become the Data Capital of Europe, and key to doing this is bringing academia and business together.
We have two key focuses at the moment - expansion and product development. We see our key growth happening abroad, particularly in the Middle East where one in four people have diabetes. A lot of our niche product development going forward will be around data and AI, and we are fortunate to have just been funded to take this forward through a national ‘AI Award’ from NHS England.
Want to learn more about MyWay Digital Health, click below to head to their website.
