Hale House exists to bring the people shaping healthcare into the same room and help good ideas turn into real impact for real people. It is a home for builders, clinicians, operators, researchers and investors who believe healthcare can work better, and who are doing the hard, unglamorous work to make that happen.
Location matters too. Being in the heart of the Harley Street Health District means innovation here is never far from delivery. Providers across the District see the realities of care at scale, and that proximity creates a powerful feedback loop. Innovators can test assumptions quickly, clinicians can shape solutions earlier, and together we can build better support for patients, not just better technology.
As it is International Women’s Month, it feels only right to spotlight some of the brilliant women in and around our community who are pushing the frontiers of health innovation. Their work spans clinical pathways, data equity, patient experience, workforce transformation and governance, but they share a common thread: improving outcomes by changing how care is designed, delivered and supported.
Dr Abeyna Jones, founder of Medic Footprints, is tackling a problem hiding in plain sight: the sustainability of the clinical workforce. Medic Footprints connects doctors with diverse career pathways beyond traditional medicine, helping clinicians build fulfilling, high-impact careers while supporting the system to retain talent in new ways. If healthcare is going to innovate, it needs clinicians who are not burnt out and boxed in.
Innovation also depends on dignity and design, and Giovanna Forte, CEO and co-founder of Forte Medical, is reframing a routine part of care that many women experience as uncomfortable, messy and often inaccurate: urine specimen collection. Forte Medical’s Peezy Midstream is designed to improve hygiene, dignity and sample quality for women’s UTI and prenatal screening, reducing contamination and retesting while improving the experience of care. It is a reminder that health innovation is not always an algorithm; sometimes it is fixing a long-ignored patient experience issue that affects outcomes.
Dr Elsa Zekeng, founder of SökerData, is pushing on one of the hardest frontiers of all – making health data more equitable, representative and useful. SökerData focuses on accelerating access to correlated genomic and clinical datasets from under-represented groups, with the goal of improving how disease risk and outcomes are understood across populations. In a world racing to apply AI to healthcare, this work matters, because models are only as good as the data foundations beneath them.
Community is one of our foundational values and Maxine Mackintosh and Angela Maragna, leaders of One HealthTech help put that value into practice. They work hard to cultivate a space that champions inclusion and supports under-represented groups to become future leaders in health innovation. Belonging, confidence and networks still shape who gets funded, hired, listened to and scaled.
Then there are founders building pathway-level care models that make life tangibly better for patients. Katerina Laks, CEO and co-founder of Migrevention, is developing a digital headache clinic designed to make evidence-based headache care more accessible and efficient, supporting patients and specialists with tools built around the realities of chronic migraine. Zoë Blake, founding CEO of CareLoop Health, is focused on severe mental illness, with a real-time monitoring and relapse prevention platform that aims to shift care from crisis response to earlier intervention and better long-term outcomes. These are exactly the kinds of solutions that benefit from what Hale House offers: proximity to clinicians, fast feedback loops, and a community that understands implementation as well as innovation.
A thriving innovation ecosystem also needs strong governance. Kasia Kaczmarek heads up the 8fold Governance team, bringing deep experience in complex healthcare services into the world of compliance and regulation, helping innovators navigate the realities of good governance without losing momentum. In healthcare, the fastest route to impact is not speed alone, it is safe, trusted adoption, and governance is part of that.
Dr Matea Deliu sits right at the intersection of frontline care, digital delivery and clinical safety. Through her roles in NHS digital delivery and her work with Health Navigator, she represents the clinician-innovator healthcare needs more of, someone who understands real-world constraints, population health and the practicalities of safe implementation.
None of this works without credible evidence and systems thinking. Professor Jenny Shand, Professor of Applied Health Research at UCL and Advisor in the Harley Street Health District ecosystem, represents the bridge between innovation and what it takes to scale responsibly evaluation, implementation and equity.
We are proud to be building the home of healthtech in the heart of the Harley Street Health District, creating a space where innovators, clinicians, providers and investors can connect, collaborate and test solutions in the real world, because healthcare transformation does not happen in isolation. The women in our community are a powerful and vital part of that story, pushing the frontiers of health innovation and helping to shape the future of healthcare through the expertise, energy and leadership they bring every day and show up with every day, not just on International Women’s Day.
