Red Star is a health-tech company building clinical software that helps clinicians identify and place patients on the right treatments faster. Its founder, Andrew Conkie, moved from financial-services IT contracting into healthcare after witnessing - through family experiences and later professional exposure - how outdated many NHS systems had become. His motivation wasn’t a single dramatic pivot, but a steady conviction: clinical teams need tools built for their real workflows, not generic platforms or headline-driven AI experiments.
Founded in Scotland, Red Star’s early AI projects, supported by Innovate UK and Biomedical Catalyst funding, revealed a crucial lesson: without first establishing robust clinical software foundations, AI couldn’t deliver sustainable real-world impact. That insight redirected the company toward building practical clinical platforms used daily within patient pathways - beginning with fracture liaison services for osteoporosis and expanding into areas such as mental health, heart-failure optimisation, and paediatric asthma.
Andrew’s early prototypes focused on AI - for example, using natural-language processing to review diabetes patient notes - but deployment surfaced the real obstacles: regulatory load, governance expectations, and infrastructure limitations inside NHS services. A Chief Scientist Office grant enabled months of co-design with clinicians, ultimately leading Red Star to build a dedicated fracture liaison system that could run every day inside real services.
That shift from experimental AI to reliable clinical software became the template for later products. Today, Red Star’s tools are being used or prepared for use across major Scottish health boards - including Glasgow, Edinburgh and Tayside - and the company is engaged in early discussions with NHS England, NHS Wales and initial outreach into Ireland. These relationships reflect a growing recognition that well-designed, fit-for-purpose clinical systems can have an immediate impact on service delivery.
Like many early healthtech teams, Red Star began with a small engineering-driven group and relied heavily on innovation grants to build and validate their product. But as pilots matured, the team recognised the familiar scaleup challenge: demonstrating clinical value is one thing, turning that value into business-as-usual procurement requires an entirely different set of capabilities - namely commercial strategy, procurement literacy, marketing, and long-term operational planning.
The realities of NHS procurement shaped Red Star’s next phase. Governance is rigorous, procurement cycles are long, and deployments can involve dozens of stakeholders across multiple sites. That complexity clarified where the team needed additional support, and informed decisions about hiring - including bringing on a marketing lead and accessing fractional machine-learning expertise to support broader platform development.
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Red Star joined Techscaler’s programmes looking for guidance on how to transform a strong technical base into a company ready for NHS environments.
Techscaler provided a support system that combined practical challenge with strategic clarity, helping Andrew look beyond the code and build the commercial and operational structure the business needed.
Through enrolment in the Techscaler growth accelerator programme, alongside mentor sessions, the team gained clear direction across marketing, finance and procurement readiness, as well as sector-specific insight into NHS governance and decision-making.
This support helped Red Star prioritise the hires, processes and messaging required to move from isolated clinical pilots into credible procurement conversations. One of the most immediate outcomes was hiring a marketing lead — a decision that sharpened visibility, generated national press coverage and strengthened engagement with health boards as deployments expanded.
Alongside commercial support, Techscaler gave Red Star the strategic grounding needed to build for scale. Mentors encouraged Andrew to think beyond short-term delivery and assess what it would take for the platform to operate across multiple health boards — secure, supportable and capable of meeting NHS procurement demands.
Through cohort sessions, peer programming and practical founder-to-founder dialogue, Andrew gained clearer perspectives on regulatory expectations, product maturity and the long operational timelines inherent in healthcare deployments.
This helped Red Star reframe its approach from “building features” to building a platform designed for sustainability and multi-site adoption. The confidence gained through this process enabled the team to engage more decisively with stakeholders, refine the product narrative and move toward enterprise-level readiness.
For Andrew, the biggest shift was perspective. Techscaler’s mentorship helped him move from isolated clinical experiments to an enterprise-ready platform that could be supported, secured and taken through procurement across multiple health boards. That guidance encouraged the team to invest in the operational, regulatory and commercial foundations needed for long-term clinical adoption.
Strategic clarity also shaped how Red Star builds its product. Instead of producing generic features, the team designs directly around clinical pathways - such as fracture liaison services - enabling clinicians to see patients sooner, accelerate treatment decisions and capture higher-quality outcome data.
Over time, this creates a rich dataset that can identify unmet needs and support smarter treatment choices, with the potential to inform future clinical and pharmaceutical research.
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Red Star’s journey highlights several lessons for founders and funders in healthtech:
Techscaler by CodeBase provided Red Star with the practical mentorship, community and resources that helped turn early clinical pilots into scalable, enterprise-ready software - a vital step in expanding impact across healthcare systems.
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