The idea for Flok was born from my experience as a professional rower. I have a background in medicine and musculoskeletal science, and I was a professional rower from 2015 to 2018. As an athlete, having daily access to my team's physiotherapist helped me recover quickly from injuries (and often avoid potential injuries altogether).
Shortly after I quit rowing I went to see my GP with back pain and, despite facing incredibly long wait times for NHS treatment and shockingly high costs for private treatment, it was a real wake-up call in terms of what accessing healthcare is like for the majority of people outside of elite sporting environments.
I had experienced first-hand how effective physiotherapy can be when provided quickly, before symptoms worsen, and I wanted to find a way to get physiotherapy to more people, faster, in a way that was cost-effective and scalable in large healthcare systems like the NHS.
Tell us about your business: what it is, what you aim to achieve, who you work with, how you reach your customers, etc.
Flok is the UK's first AI-powered physiotherapy clinic. We are enabling NHS patients to access same-day video call appointments to treat their back pain, using AI physiotherapists to provide personalised, on-demand appointments at scale with no waiting lists.
Importantly, we're not just developing new technology, we're also regulatory approved as a healthcare provider to deliver the full treatment pathway directly to patients on behalf of our NHS partners – meaning we're creating an entirely new digital care pathway for MSK patients in the NHS.
Our platform is the first and only digital MSK provider approved by the CQC and automates the entire care pathway for most patients, including initial assessment and triage. Patients are our end users, but our customers are NHS commissioners and trusts.
We have already run some successful trials with NHS Trusts and plan to roll out the platform later this year, allowing NHS patients to self-refer to Flok for a same-day appointment.
Our goal is to end long waiting lists for MSK physiotherapy in the UK. Currently, MSK physiotherapy accounts for around a third of GP appointments, and waiting lists for community physiotherapy services average over 12 weeks. Imagine the impact if the majority of these patients could be managed through Flok, accessing appointments at a time that is convenient for them, freeing up capacity in existing services. MSK conditions such as back pain are currently the biggest cause of disability globally. We can change this by giving people world-class care, quickly and on-demand.
How has the business evolved since you started and when was that?
My co-founder, Rick, and I started developing Flok in 2022. We received regulatory approval (CQC and MHRA) in 2023, which is when our first NHS trials began. We expect to launch in several NHS Trusts later this year. Over that time, the problem we are trying to solve hasn't changed, but our solution has certainly evolved. Specifically, we found ourselves needing to build a much more sophisticated approach to decision automation than we had originally envisioned. We realized that existing programming languages weren't great at fully describing the complexities and nuances of clinical reasoning. This led us to develop our own new domain-specific programming language that could. This language enables our engine to react appropriately autonomously to a wide range of potential clinical scenarios, and has been proven safe to deploy at scale without direct human oversight.
What is the work culture like at Flok Health?
We're big believers in working together in person, with the whole team working together in our Cambridge office at least 80% of the time. We've found that this massively enhances collaboration and team culture, making it easier for everyone to stay aligned while moving at the same pace. To foster this, we're adamant about making our office environment a truly conducive place to work. It's a converted grain elevator on a farm in Cambridge, so we're surrounded by fields and natural light. It also has a well-equipped team gym to help us practice what we preach.
How are you funded?
In July 2022, the company raised £2 million in a seed round led by Eka Ventures and joined by angel investors including Form Ventures, Paul Roberts (co-founder of CMR Surgical) and Paul Forster (co-founder of Indeed.com). The company was also awarded an Innovate UK Smart Grant in December last year to help fund its expansion.
What has been your biggest challenge so far and how did you overcome it?
Our biggest challenge is one we deliberately set for ourselves: we strongly believed from the start that the true value of a digital MSK offering could only be realised if we offered a complete digital clinic service that went beyond just digital care to safely manage patients from self-referral to discharge.
Doing this would have made the service fundamentally more difficult to develop: we would have had to build software that could automate safety decisions (all previous digital MSK solutions for back pain have relied on a human clinician assessing the patient before they accessed the pathway) and it also meant facing significant additional regulatory hurdles (CQC, MHRA).
To achieve this, we've worked closely with UK regulators and the additional development and clinical effort has undoubtedly been worthwhile. Being able to control every element of a patient's care pathway means we can deliver a faster, better experience to our patients. And becoming a registered healthcare provider will transform the way we work with our NHS customers; it will enable us, as healthcare providers, to build deeper partnerships.
How does Flok address an unmet need?
Currently, over 300,000 people are on the NHS MSK physiotherapy waiting list, with a quarter of these patients waiting more than three months to be seen. As a result, over 30 million working days are lost each year in the UK due to MSK conditions, accounting for up to 30% of GP consultations in England. These conditions are too common to see every patient in the same room as a clinician, so new models of care are needed to deliver appropriate care on a population scale.
“This is a huge problem, making it increasingly difficult for patients to get the physical therapy they need. Our technology has proven it can automate many of these appointments, freeing up doctors' time where needed and allowing patients to be seen instantly and more conveniently.
Early trials have shown that patients are extremely satisfied with our service and it is effective, and as the only CQC accredited digital MSK provider in the UK, we are uniquely positioned to meet this unmet need and transform the way physiotherapy is delivered in the NHS.
What does the future hold?
We started with a back pain clinic, but our technology and ambitions are much broader. Our goal is to build the world's best community healthcare provider. Demands on healthcare systems around the world are only increasing. Our role is to increase the number of clinicians by automating high volume care pathways, freeing up capacity for existing services. We are already working to expand our AI Clinic to other common health conditions, and will be launching new services later this year.
What is one piece of advice you would give to other founders or future founders?
One of my early investors gave me some advice that I find myself coming back to surprisingly often: “Things are never as good or as bad as they first seem.” It's so important to find ways to get energized through the good and bad times. Best of all, it makes everything more fun. And don't forget your cofounders.
Finally, a more personal question: What are your daily routines and life rules currently?
Starting a company is pretty hard, so I try to be consistent with the basics during the week: get to the office early to use the gym (usually a ski ergo), cook a decent meal, read an interesting book before bed and get a good night's sleep. I think the routine is a bit like a startup, and if you succeed more often than you fail, you're probably doing well.
Finn Stevenson is CEO and co-founder of Flok Health.
