Most healthtech founders arrive through laboratories or hospital corridors. Chess Howard's path was different: she entered the field by examining insurance claims. Beginning at 18 on Wall Street in reinsurance, she spent more than 14 years navigating the Lloyd's of London market at firms including Aon, Gallagher and Howden, where she advised healthcare and life sciences companies on risk management and structured complex insurance and clinical trial programmes across multiple jurisdictions.
Her work exposed her to the entire care ecosystem, from drug and device manufacturers to the pharmacies, hospitals and clinics delivering treatment to patients. This vantage point revealed healthcare's vulnerabilities: why connected devices fail in real-world settings, what triggers product recalls and where liability falls when treatments cause harm. By age 30, she was directing a Healthcare and Life Sciences division in the Lloyd's market. In 2022, she was shortlisted as a BIBA Young Broker of the Year finalist.
Throughout her career, Howard kept encountering the same systemic failure: once a medicine reached a patient's hands, no one was documenting what happened next. In 2025, she founded Vita Panacea to address this gap, launching Nexus, a connected medication management system she spent two years developing. The device is currently undergoing UK medical device registration, with patent applications submitted in the UK, the US and internationally. This year, Nexus received a Red Dot Design Concept award, and Howard was named a finalist for Most Innovative Woman of the Year in Healthcare at the Stevie Awards for Women in Business.
What Nexus Does
Nexus operates as a connected medication management ecosystem combining hardware, software and a replenishment service into a unified system centred on the patient. The device itself is design-led, patient-centric, portable and modular, comprising three Med Pods: Air for ambient medicines, Cryo for cold-chain injectables requiring storage between 2°C and 8°C, and Edge for sharps.
Patients select the pods their treatment requires. Each pod records adherence by logging every dose taken and every storage reading. The Nexus app interprets the pharmacy label or treatment plan, builds the schedule and reminders from it, and converts instructions into plain language and pictograms. It also monitors expiry dates, maintains the record and integrates the MHRA's Yellow Card scheme, allowing patients to report side effects from the same interface where they log doses.
Clinicians and care teams access the record through a dedicated portal. Pharmacies connect via their own portal through Nexus Replenish, a replenishment service that reorders supplies before they run out, collects full sharps bins and expired medicines, and keeps patients informed without requiring their involvement. This architecture links patients, clinicians, care teams and pharmacies around a single record, ensuring that a patient receiving multidisciplinary care and every clinician treating them work from identical information. The entire system prioritises three outcomes: adherence, efficacy and wastage reduction.
The core problem is straightforward: healthcare maintains detailed tracking of medicines until they reach the pharmacy counter, then the record ends. From that point forward, clinicians depend entirely on what patients remember to report. Nexus creates a record where none has existed before.
The Scale of the Problem
The most expensive phase of a medicine's journey is now the least documented, and that phase is expanding rapidly. Chronic disease prevalence is rising, and treatments for long-term conditions are becoming increasingly sophisticated. The Health Foundation projects that nearly one in five adults in England will have major illness by 2040, an increase of more than a third from 2019. Diabetes is among the conditions driving this rise, with more than 4.7 million people in the UK already diagnosed.
Many of the fastest-growing treatments for chronic conditions are injections rather than tablets, including insulin and GLP-1s for diabetes and obesity, biologics for rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's, psoriasis and multiple sclerosis, and an expanding range of cancer treatments. Most cost hundreds or thousands of pounds monthly and many depend on an unbroken cold chain, yet they are increasingly stored in kitchen fridges, handbags and hotel rooms.
Over 500,000 people already receive specialist medicines at home through NHS clinical homecare, a sector costing between £3bn and £4bn annually—though even this figure is contested. When a Lords committee investigated in 2023, it discovered that the Government could not quantify its spending on the service and that no one could determine how many patients experienced delays, missed deliveries or suffered harm from service failures.
The medicines and the money have migrated into homes, but the information trail has not followed them.
Personal and Professional Inspiration
Three distinct experiences pointed Howard toward the same gap. While caring for her grandparents as dementia progressed, she witnessed the daily burden of medication management: plastic pill boxes cluttering kitchen tables, no way to verify whether doses had been taken, medicines silently expiring, labels that were illegible or incomprehensible, and products that seemed designed for hospitals rather than homes.
She then became a patient herself. Following a major skiing accident in 2025 and subsequent surgery, she had to relearn walking while coordinating with a multidisciplinary team, each clinician issuing separate instructions, while managing multiple medications and injections. Her inability to reach a pharmacy sparked the concept of a replenishment service that travels to the patient.
Professionally, Howard was the person reviewing files most never see: claims, recalls and trial data. Three identical problems surfaced repeatedly: wasted medicines, underperforming medicines and products recalled after reaching patients. The industry invested heavily in protecting products until handover, then relied on hope. No one was building the solution to bridge that gap. Nexus is Howard's response.
The personal experiences shaped the product as profoundly as the professional ones. Both her grandparents and she deserved something designed for the person taking the medicine. Vita Panacea was established on a principle: a medication system should meet consumer standards, with nothing that stigmatises the user. It should be something one is proud to carry.
Designing an Ecosystem Without Adding Complexity
The design process began with the patient's daily reality. Every component of Nexus had to pass a single test: does it eliminate a task for the patient, or create one? The three system components share one setup and one record, so patients never need to manually connect the hardware, app and replenishment service.
The app constructs the schedule from the clinician's treatment plan itself, eliminating manual data entry. The pods automatically record storage conditions and doses. Replenish handles reordering, collection and confirmation without patient involvement. Nexus demands attention only when necessary: a dose is due, an injection nears expiry, a Cryo unit is out of range or supplies are running low. Everything else operates invisibly.
Modularity serves the same purpose on the hardware side. A patient on a single ambient medicine receives one pod and nothing unnecessary. Portability was non-negotiable for identical reasons: complex therapy should never prevent someone from taking a business trip or holiday. The pods were engineered to travel with the patient, and the record follows them.
The hardware faced an additional test: whether it resembles something one would choose to purchase or something handed over in a clinic. It was designed to consumer-product standards with clinical rigour underneath. No one should need to explain a private, complex therapy to a colleague, host or hotel receptionist because of what their medication looks like or where it must be stored. With Nexus, they don't.
The same principle applies to clinicians, who receive a single record instead of another inbox to monitor. Complexity undermines adherence, and systems demanding too much from people simply fall into disuse.
Why Medication Adherence Remains a Challenge
Taking and managing complex medications, frequently multiple simultaneously, is demanding work, yet the system treats it as simple. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) estimates that between a third and a half of medicines prescribed for long-term conditions are not taken as recommended, and the NHS loses around £300 million annually to medicines never used.
These figures rely on patient memory and self-reporting, and people tend to overstate adherence to clinicians they wish not to disappoint. Carelessness is rarely the cause. Every medication management tool—from labels to pill boxes to repeat prescriptions—was designed for a single daily tablet. Yet patients are now expected to self-inject cold-chain biologics on complex schedules using the same tools.
Instructions are delivered once in a consulting room and never revisited. Regimes grow more complicated with each new clinician involved. Labels make sense to pharmacists but to almost no one else. No one can determine whether a dose was taken or a medicine stored correctly. Cold-chain medicines require a fridge that commutes, working days or weeks away rarely provide. The simple act of collecting a repeat prescription—with its queues, waiting times and out-of-stock medicines—defeats people who are unwell, immobile or travelling.
Between appointments, no one is watching, so problems emerge months later, if at all. Adherence apps address part of the problem, and reminders have value, but a reminder only works if the medicine is in date and within reach, the person can act on it and someone discovers when they don't.
The efficient solution is to remove the remembering burden from the patient entirely: capture the record automatically, act on it without being asked and reorder before supplies run out. The care team is notified only when something requires their attention, such as a missed dose or a cold-chain breach, so clinical effort goes where needed. That is a closed loop, and it is efficient because it demands nothing of the person it aims to help.
Visibility and Accountability
In insurance, the question following any incident is always identical: what does the record say? For medicines at home, the answer has always been that no record exists. When records are absent, blame drifts to whoever can least defend themselves—typically the patient.
Visibility transforms this in three ways. For patient safety, a missed dose or cold-chain breach is detected when it occurs rather than surfacing at the next appointment. A patient receiving multidisciplinary care has every clinician on the team working from the same record. A carer with the patient's consent sees the same information, so the person managing worry is no longer doing so blind.
The connection runs in all four directions: between patient, clinician, care team and pharmacy. A supply problem at the pharmacy is caught before it becomes a missed dose at home, and a missed dose at home reaches people who can intervene.
For treatment decisions, the clinician retains full authority but makes it based on evidence. Before adjusting a dose or switching a drug, they can verify whether the treatment was actually taken and stored as intended.
For accountability, a consented, time-stamped record protects everyone when something goes wrong: the patient who followed instructions, the clinician who needs to understand what happened, and the manufacturer facing a complaint or recall. An adverse event report then has a record supporting it.
Howard has been deliberate about boundaries. Clinicians see the record, never a recording. Nothing is shared without patient consent. The record belongs to the patient and travels with them from one consultant to the next. Silence protects no one, and the home has remained silent far too long.
Lessons from Insurance and Risk
The first lesson is that the most expensive risks are those never measured. Underwriters evaluate three factors: exposure, loss history and control quality. Where data is absent, they either increase the price or decline. The final stage of medicine has operated without any of these three, which is why Nexus exists.
Sequencing is the second lesson. In insurance, difficult questions about liability, regulation and evidence are posed before a product reaches market, never after. Nexus's regulatory strategy, quality system and clinical evidence plan were constructed alongside the product from inception. The team considers the recall before considering the launch.
Borders matter as the third lesson. Howard spent years designing programmes across jurisdictions, where a product acceptable in one market can be uninsurable in another. Nexus was designed with UK, EU and US regulation in view from the start.
Language is the fourth. Howard spent 14 years converting complex risk into something a board could decide on in 10 minutes. A product that overclaims becomes a liability for everyone, so Nexus states exactly what it does and nothing it doesn't.
Challenges as a Woman Founder in Medtech
Howard started her career at 18 in a male-dominated industry, so being outnumbered in rooms was familiar. What was unfamiliar was medtech itself, which combines four disciplines: hardware, software, regulation and clinical evidence. Most founders master only one. Building a physical device without an engineering background means credibility is earned prototype by prototype.
Hardware also requires more time and money than software, and investors accustomed to software timelines need explanation. The woman founder aspect surfaces less in rooms than in the questions asked there. Research demonstrates that investors ask male founders about upside and female founders about downside. Howard came from risk, so she answers downside questions better than most, then makes them ask about upside.
The funding data tells the rest of the story: all-female founder teams received 2% of UK equity investment in 2025, the same share they have averaged for a decade, in a year when equity funding rose by more than a third. Howard is not complaining about it, because the path forward is the same as it was on a trading floor or at a Lloyd's box: know the numbers better than anyone else and bring the evidence.
What Comes Next
The next 12 months focus on proof. The pilot programme opens in mid-2027, and Nexus launches into private healthcare first. Simultaneously, the clinical advisory board will expand, bringing together senior clinicians from the specialties Nexus serves, because the people who will use the record should shape it. Partnerships will grow with hospitals, clinics, pharmacies and sector organisations. From private healthcare, the path leads into care homes and then into the NHS, each step earned by evidence from the previous one. Wherever it is prescribed, Nexus will have existed in the patient's home from the first unit. International launch follows immediately after the UK.
Success means different things to different users. A patient would call it success if they remain on a treatment they were struggling with and travel, work and live without their medication dictating what they can do. A clinician would call it success once a Nexus record is something they expect to see when a new patient arrives, the way they expect to see blood results today.
For the company, success extends beyond Nexus. Vita Panacea exists to identify market problems everyone else has learned to accept and build devices that solve them. Products following Nexus are already in planning, each a separate device for a different problem, each held to the same standard: properly regulated, built to consumer-product standards and something a person is proud to carry.
In five years, Howard wants Vita Panacea to be the company clinicians think of first when a treatment leaves the building, with Nexus in homes across the UK and beyond and the next device already in patients' hands.
The ambition for Nexus itself is simple to state and hard to achieve: make the home the best-recorded part of a medicine's journey instead of the worst.
Source: TechRound
