Most founders find their way into healthtech through a lab or a hospital ward. Chess Howard came in through the claims file. She started her career at 18 on Wall Street in reinsurance, then spent more than 14 years in the Lloyd’s of London market across Aon, Gallagher and Howden, advising healthcare and life sciences companies on their risk and structuring complex insurance and clinical trial programmes across multiple jurisdictions.
Her clients spanned the whole chain of care, with drug and device developers at one end and the pharmacies, hospitals and clinics delivering treatment to patients at the other. That meant learning health technology through its weak points: why connected devices break down in the field, why products get recalled and where liability lands when a treatment goes wrong. By 30 she was heading a Healthcare and Life Sciences division in the Lloyd’s market, and in 2022 she was a BIBA Young Broker of the Year finalist.
Along the way, she kept running into the same blind spot: nobody was recording what happens to a medicine once it reaches the patient. In 2025 she founded Vita Panacea to fix that, with Nexus, a connected medication management system she invented and spent two years developing, as its first product. Nexus is now going through UK medical device registration, with patent applications filed in the UK, the US and internationally. It won a Red Dot Design Concept award this year, the same year Howard was named a finalist for Most Innovative Woman of the Year in Healthcare at the Stevie Awards for Women in Business.
Howard shared with us how Nexus works, why the home has become healthcare’s least-recorded place and what a career in risk taught her about building medtech.
What is Nexus, how does it work and what problem in healthcare are you trying to solve with it?
Nexus is a connected medication management ecosystem: hardware, software and a replenishment service designed as one system around the patient. The Nexus device is design-led, patient-centric, portable and modular, built as three Med Pods: Air for ambient medicines, Cryo for cold-chain injectables that must be kept between 2°C and 8°C and Edge for sharps.
Patients use whichever pods their treatment needs, and each pod records adherence, logging every dose taken and every storage reading. The Nexus app does the thinking. It scans the pharmacy label or the patient’s treatment plan, builds the schedule and reminders from it and converts the instructions into plain language and pictograms. It also flags expiry dates, keeps the record and has the MHRA’s Yellow Card scheme built in, so a patient can report a side effect from the same place they log a dose.
Clinicians and care teams see that record through the clinician portal, and pharmacies connect through their own portal via Nexus Replenish, our replenishment service, which reorders supplies before they run out, collects full sharps bins and expired medicines, and keeps the patient informed without them having to think about any of it.
Together they connect patients, clinicians, care teams and pharmacies around a single record, so a patient under multidisciplinary care and every clinician treating them are finally working from the same information. Every part is focused on three things: adherence, efficacy and wastage.
The problem is easy to describe: healthcare tracks a medicine in detail right up to the pharmacy counter, and then the record stops. From that point, everything a clinician knows depends on what the patient remembers to say. Nexus puts a record where there has never been one.
You’ve said that healthcare is missing a record of what happens to medicines once they go home. Why is this such a significant problem, particularly as more expensive and temperature-sensitive treatments become commonplace?
Because the most expensive part of a medicine’s journey is now the part with the least information, and that part is growing fastest.
Chronic disease is rising and the treatments for it are becoming more complex. The Health Foundation projects that nearly one in five adults in England will be living with major illness by 2040, up more than a third on 2019. Diabetes is among the conditions driving that rise, and more than 4.7 million people in the UK are already diagnosed with it.
Many of the fastest-growing treatments for long-term 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 a growing number of cancer treatments.
Most cost hundreds or thousands of pounds a month and many depend on an unbroken cold chain, yet more and more of them are kept in kitchen fridges, handbags and hotel rooms.
More than 500,000 people already receive specialist medicines at home through NHS clinical homecare, a sector costing somewhere between £3bn and £4bn a year, and even that figure is disputed. When a Lords committee examined it in 2023, it found that the Government couldn’t say how much it spends on the service and that nobody could say how many patients had suffered delays, missed deliveries or been harmed when it failed.
The money and the medicines have moved into the home, and the information hasn’t followed them.
What inspired you to develop Nexus? How did your professional experience and personal experiences shape the product?
Three experiences pointed at the same gap. I cared for my grandparents as dementia set in, and I saw the daily labour of medication management: plastic pill boxes on the kitchen table, no way of knowing whether a dose had already been taken, medicines quietly going out of date, labels they couldn’t read or understand and the indignity of products that looked like they belonged in a hospital.
Then I became the patient. After a major skiing accident in 2025 and the surgery that followed, I had to learn to walk again while dealing with a multidisciplinary team, each clinician with their own instructions, alongside multiple medications and injections. I also couldn’t get to a pharmacy, which is where the idea of a replenishment service that comes to the patient was born.
Professionally, I was the person reading the files most people never see: the claims, the recalls and the trial data. The same three problems kept appearing: medicines wasted, medicines that underperformed and products recalled after they’d already reached patients.
The industry spent enormous sums protecting a product up to the moment it was handed over, then simply hoped, and nobody was building the thing that would close that gap. Nexus is my answer to it.
The personal side shaped the product as much as the professional one, because my grandparents and I both deserved something designed for the person taking the medicine.
Vita Panacea was founded on the principle that a medication system should be built to consumer standards, with nothing about it that stigmatises the person using it: something you’re proud to carry.
Nexus combines connected hardware, software and a repeat-prescription service. How did you approach designing an ecosystem that makes managing medication easier without adding another layer of complexity to patients’ lives?
We started from the patient’s day, and every piece of Nexus had to pass the same test: does it remove a job from the patient, or add one? The three parts share one set-up and one record, so the patient never has to make the hardware, the app and the replenishment service talk to each other.
The app builds the schedule from the clinician’s own treatment plan, so nobody types in a regime. The pods record storage and doses by themselves, and Replenish reorders, collects and confirms without the patient having to remember any of it. Nexus only asks for attention when something needs it: a dose due, an injection approaching expiry, a Cryo unit out of range or a supply running low, while everything else runs in the background.
Modularity does the same job on the hardware side, because a patient on one ambient medicine gets one pod and nothing they don’t need. Portability was non-negotiable for the same reason, because a complex therapy should never be the reason someone turns down a business trip or a holiday, so the pods were built to go with the patient, and the record goes where they go.
The hardware then had to pass a harder test, which is whether it looks like something you would choose to buy or something you were handed in a clinic, so it was designed to consumer-product standards, with the clinical rigour underneath. Nobody should have to explain a private, complex therapy to a colleague, a host or a hotel receptionist because of what their medication looks like or where it has to be kept, and with Nexus they don’t.
The same principle applies to clinicians, who get a single record instead of another inbox to check. Complexity is the enemy of adherence, and a system that asks too much of people simply stops being used.
Why do you think so many people struggle to take their medication as prescribed, and how could technology help address this problem in the most efficient way possible?
Because taking and managing complex medications, often several at once, is hard work, and the system treats it as if it were easy.
NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) has estimated that between a third and a half of medicines prescribed for long-term conditions aren’t taken as recommended, and the NHS loses around £300 million a year to medicines that are never used.
Those figures are also only as good as the patient’s memory, since they rest on self-reporting, and people over-report adherence to the clinician they do not want to disappoint.
The reasons are rarely carelessness. Every tool in the management of medicine, from the label to the pill box to the repeat prescription, was designed for a tablet taken once a day, and we now expect people to self-inject cold-chain biologics on a schedule with the same tools.
Instructions are spoken once in a consulting room and never seen again, regimes get more complicated with every new clinician involved, labels make sense to pharmacists and to almost nobody else, and nobody can tell whether a dose was taken or a medicine was stored correctly.
Cold-chain medicines need a fridge that a commute, a working day or a week away rarely provides, and 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 nobody is looking, so problems surface months later, if they surface at all. Adherence apps have answered part of the problem, and reminders have their place, but a reminder only works if the medicine is in date and within reach, the person is in a position to act on it and someone finds out when they don’t.
The efficient answer is to take the remembering away from the patient altogether: capture the record automatically, act on it without being asked and reorder before the box is empty. The care team is told only when something needs them, such as a missed dose or a cold-chain breach, so clinical attention goes where it’s needed. That’s a closed loop, and it’s efficient because it asks nothing of the person it’s trying to help.
Nexus is designed to make medication storage and management more visible to clinicians and care teams. What could this change mean for patient safety, treatment decisions and accountability when something goes wrong?
In insurance, the first question after any incident is always the same: what does the record say? For medicines at home, the answer has always been that there’s no record, and when there’s no record, blame drifts to whoever can least defend themselves, which is usually the patient.
Visibility changes that in three ways. For patient safety, a missed dose or a cold-chain breach is seen when it happens instead of surfacing at the next appointment, a patient under multidisciplinary care has every clinician on the team working from the same record, and a carer with the patient’s consent sees the same thing, so the person doing the worrying is no longer doing it blind.
The link runs all four ways, between patient, clinician, care team and pharmacy, so a supply problem at the pharmacy is caught before it becomes a missed dose at home, and a missed dose at home reaches the people who can do something about it.
For treatment decisions, the clinician still makes every call, but makes it on evidence, because before changing a dose or switching a drug they can see 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 did everything right, the clinician who needs to know what happened, and the manufacturer facing a complaint or a recall. An adverse event report then has a record behind it.
We’ve been deliberate about the limits. Clinicians see the record, never a recording, nothing is shared without the patient’s consent, and the record belongs to the patient, so it travels with them from one consultant to the next. Silence protects nobody, and the home has been silent for far too long.
What lessons from your career in insurance and risk management have proved most valuable when building Vita Panacea?
The first is that the most expensive risks are the ones nobody measured. Underwriters rate on three things: exposure, loss history and the quality of the controls. Where the data is missing they either load the price or walk away, and the last mile of medicine has been running without any of the three, which is why Nexus exists.
Then there’s sequencing. In insurance the hard questions on liability, regulation and evidence are asked before a product reaches the market, never after, so our regulatory strategy, quality system and clinical evidence plan were built alongside the product from the start, and we think about the recall before we think about the launch.
Borders matter, which is the third. I spent years structuring programmes across jurisdictions, where a product acceptable in one market can be uninsurable in the next, so Nexus was designed with UK, EU and US regulation in view from the beginning.
The last is language. I spent 14 years turning complex risk into something a board could decide on in 10 minutes, and a product that overclaims is a liability for everyone, so we say exactly what Nexus does and nothing it doesn’t.
As a woman founder developing a medtech product, what have been the biggest challenges in taking Nexus from concept to a product preparing for regulatory approval and launch?
I started my career in a male-dominated industry at 18, so being outnumbered in a room was nothing new. What was new was medtech itself, which is four disciplines at once: hardware, software, regulation and clinical evidence. Most founders only ever have to master one, and building a physical device without an engineering background means credibility is earned prototype by prototype.
Hardware also takes longer and costs more than software, and investors used to software timelines need walking through why. The woman founder part shows up less in the room than in the questions asked there.
Research shows investors ask male founders about the upside and female founders about the downside, and I came from risk, so I answer the downside better than most and then make them ask about the upside.
The funding data says the rest: 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. I’m not complaining about it, because the way through 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 for Vita Panacea, and what would success look like for Nexus over the next few years as you work towards bringing it into private healthcare, care homes, the NHS and consumers’ homes?
The next 12 months are about proof. Our pilot programme opens in mid-2027, and Nexus launches into private healthcare first. Alongside that, we’ll keep growing our clinical advisory board, which already brings together senior clinicians from across the specialties Nexus serves, because the people who’ll use the record are the ones who should shape it. We’ll also partner with hospitals, clinics, pharmacies and organisations across the sector. From private healthcare, the path runs into care homes and then into the NHS, each step earned by the evidence from the one before, and wherever it is prescribed, Nexus has lived in the patient’s home from the very first unit. International launch follows straight after the UK.
Success looks different to each of the people Nexus is built for. A patient would call it success if they stay on a treatment they were struggling with, and travel, work and live without their medication deciding 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 is bigger than Nexus. Vita Panacea exists to find the problems in the market that everyone else has learned to live with and to build the devices that solve them. The products that follow Nexus are already being planned, each one a separate device for a different problem and each held to the same bar: properly regulated, built to consumer-product standards and something a person is proud to carry.
In five years I want 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 our next device already in patients’ hands.
The ambition for Nexus itself is simple to state and hard to do: make the home the best-recorded part of a medicine’s journey instead of the worst.
