How do a pharmacist and an NHS Care Coordinator become the driving forces behind the UK’s largest Personal Health Record (PHR) platform?
At Patients Know Best (PKB), the path to product leadership isn’t found in a computer science textbook – it was forged in the real world of clinical rigour and patient advocacy.
In this blog, we hear from two PKB leaders who traded their more traditional healthcare routes for tech. They share how the precision of music theory, the high-stakes environment of pharmacy, and the frustrations of fragmented NHS admin provided a helpful blueprint for building national-scale digital infrastructure.
From being the first to integrate with the IM1 and the NHS App to navigating the “sad paths” of user experience, their stories highlight why frontline experience can be a powerful tool in shaping product development.
Reflections on my path to Product Leadership
Joanne Crean, Head of Product, Patients Know Best
If you had asked a younger version of me what I wanted to be when I grew up, ‘Product Team Lead in Healthtech’ wouldn’t have been on the radar. At that time, I was a keen musician, inspired by my father, a science teacher and musician.
Looking back, the path from those early passions, through pharmacy, to leadership at Patients Know Best (PKB) wasn’t a climb up a traditional career ladder. It was about following a thread of rigour, an interest in systems, and a bit of a gut feeling.
The orchestra of product management
How has an early interest in music influenced my work? In an orchestra, you practice your part in isolation, which can feel repetitive. However, when the group comes together, the result is where it matters. I carry that into my work today. I don’t mind the repetitive tasks if the outcome is significant. Breaking a large idea into its component parts and ensuring they work together is just conducting by another name.
Ten years in at PKB, my role has shifted to overseeing the company product roadmap. The company now operates across numerous NHS Trusts, national programmes, and international markets. It’s about planning how each part influences the next and ensuring the sequence actually works for the person using it.
Lessons from the pharmacy
I chose pharmacy as a career., following in my grandfather’s footsteps, It was a profession I respected, and it was also where I first saw the impact of a disjointed healthcare system.
As a pharmacist, I spent a lot of time verifying information, calling doctors to clarify prescriptions or trying to piece together a patient’s medical history to check for drug interactions. I saw firsthand how fragmented information was a safety risk.
Pharmacy drills into you that there is no room for error. You learn the importance of good system design, preventing mistakes before they ever reach the patient. In healthtech, we have to apply that same clinical rigour. If the design is poor, the consequences are real.
Trusting my instincts
After finishing a PhD, I was keen to try something new while I figured out my next steps. I landed an internship in the European Commission in Brussels, focusing on eHealth. This was a time of rapid personal and professional development. It was there I re-encountered PKB, having first heard of them while volunteering for Ashoka. I was once again struck by their mission and decided to reach out, joining them as a Project Manager. While I had initially expected to stay for a year or two, I’m still here ten years later! During this time my passion for this area has only grown, and the work continues to be deeply engaging and rewarding.
Moving to national systems
My decade at PKB has involved moving from managing individual projects to leading integrations with national government infrastructures.
A major milestone was our work with the IM1 API to provide patients with their GP data. Seeing this come through was rewarding because it opened new ways to support patient care.
The integration with the NHS App was another big one. Previously, registration was only possible via invite. Integrating with the NHS app -and being the first to do so – was a significant move. It required us to rethink how users access records, shifting to NHS login.That transition led to a significant increase in usage. Data that had been sitting idle was finally accessible to the people who needed it most: the patients.
Advice: Look for the good
Healthtech is a long game. It is highly regulated, often slow, and the systems are under immense pressure. Unlike consumer tech, you don’t see results overnight.
My advice to those entering this space, especially aspiring leaders ,is something I learned from our founder, Mohammad: Stay optimistic. It is easy to default to complaining about resources or the pace of change. But to lead, you have to look for what’s good in the work, no matter how small.
If you find an area that interests you, follow it. Don’t worry too much about what looks sensible on a CV. When you follow your curiosity, you might just find yourself ten years into a job you thought you’d only stay at for one.
How the User Journey Became My Motivation
Ruth Whichelow, UX Lead, Patients Know Best
In 2010, I took my first role in healthcare, working for an NHS service that was aimed at improving access to health services. At the time, I didn’t realise that the frustrations of that role would become the catalyst for a career in product design. My impetus didn’t come from a love of technical specifications; it came from seeing the holes in the system and wanting to champion the person on the other side of the screen.
From manual workarounds to digital solutions
Initially, I worked in a triage service where we reviewed GP referral letters to determine the most appropriate care pathway for each patient. They were almost always insufficient – usually just three lines of text from a doctor, with no accompanying blood tests or medical history. We would spend our days manually copying data from one system to another, trying to follow pathways that felt fundamentally broken.
Later, working for a similar service that focused on care planning, our nurses were tasked to signpost patients to appropriate support & services, much of which involved handing out stacks of paper leaflets and care plans. I watched as patients—some of whom were at risk of slipping through the cracks—inevitably lost that paperwork before they even got home. I kept thinking: “If only there were a place to record this electronically and share it.”
When I joined PKB, I started in the Success Team, deploying the platform on the ground to services similar to those I had been managing, replacing the paper leaflets and plans with PKB. I quickly realised that the ‘look and feel’ of a system determines whether a clinician actually uses it or a patient actually understands it. I helped start PKB’s Product team because I wanted to solve the problems I had witnessed firsthand.
Scale through the National Front Door
Building at a national scale has been an incredible way to bridge those gaps for more people. In 2019, when I started leading our integration with NHS login and the NHS App, it wasn’t the ‘national front door’ it is today. Back then, it was a quiet project, and few realised it would eventually become the backbone of the government’s 10-year health strategy.
We were the first Personal Health Record (PHR) to integrate with NHS login in late 2019. At the time, it was a massive milestone because it effectively removed the ‘gatekeeper.’ Clinicians no longer had to manually verify a patient’s identity; for the first time, patients had the power to verify themselves.
When COVID-19 hit, that early work became vital. As usage of the NHS App surged, we were already in place to offer patients immediate, secure access to their records—from test results to care plans. Since then, I’ve led our involvement in NHS England’s Wayfinder Service as part of the first cohort of Personal Engagement Portals (PEPs) to implement the national programme.
It’s been exciting to see this initiative go live across the majority of our Trusts. Most recently, I’ve been leading the charge as PKB became the first to adapt these screens for Mental Health Trusts over the past year, ensuring the same seamless experience is available to all patients.
Putting the ‘real world’ into UX
My role as UX/UI Lead is to ensure the experience always makes sense from the user’s perspective. I have a strong creative drive — I care about the look, the feel, and the user’s journey — which I think stems from my first love, literature. While the back-end architecture is complex and vital, I’m focused on the narrative: how the story unfolds for the user, whether it flows coherently, and whether every element serves a clear purpose. If something feels out of place, confusing, or self-indulgent, I want to edit it out. For me, it’s about ensuring the final experience reads clearly, naturally, and truthfully.
When a developer or a clinician wants a specific feature, I’m the one who says: “In the real world, a patient will be confused by this,” or “A clinician doesn’t have time for that extra click.” We focus heavily on the “sad paths”—the moments where the user doesn’t follow the planned journey—to make sure the system is truly intuitive when people are stressed or in a rush.
Scaling through shared learning
Working with NHS England on this for the long haul has been a genuine exercise in sector-wide collaboration. While their teams and consultants naturally change over a multi-year project, the depth of their user research is invaluable. They have the capacity to perform deep community outreach—talking to patients in community centres where English isn’t a first language—and they share those outcomes with us.
It’s a two-way street; we share our own user research, and they share theirs. This exchange has been highly productive, allowing us to swap practicalities and learnings not just with the centre, but with other suppliers and our respective customers. This level of collaboration supports and encourages innovation in a very practical space, making sure technology isn’t just ‘available,’ but truly accessible to everyone.
Speak up: Your experience is your power
For a long time, I felt like an imposter because I didn’t see myself as a “tech person.” But having worked inside a healthcare provider’s office and witnessed the pain points first-hand, I realised that I bring genuine expertise to the problem we’re solving.
Understanding the real-world challenges — how systems fail, where processes break down, and how it feels for staff and patients — is just as valuable as technical knowledge. That perspective matters.
Your frontline experience is your power. Use every opportunity to get exposure to different teams, learn the why behind the what, and never stop advocating for the person on the other side of the screen.