Since 2019, patients in the UK have been able to book GP appointments through the myGP app, which now has more than two million users. The company behind myGP, iPlato Healthcare, entered America’s much larger healthcare market seven years ago, but its US operations have struggled to grow, and account for less than 2 per cent of its overall revenue.
The reason for this is that data protection requirements and health procurement systems change across borders, explains Tobias Alpsten, iPlato’s CEO. “There are major regulatory challenges,” he says. “Effectively you have to rebuild your platform for every country.”
As the economy becomes increasingly digitised, the UK should attempt to replicate the success it has had combining its world-leading finance and tech sectors in other parts of the economy, says David, citing deeptech (that for substantial scientific and engineering problems), edtech (education) and healthtech as potential growth areas.
“The ones that are going to really grow are the ones where you’ve got capability, and you’ve got deployment,” he says. Healthtech, he says, is a good example. “We have fantastic research and development, as we showed in the vaccine development, and you ally that with huge deployment, which you can do through the NHS, [and] then all of a sudden you can actually grow a huge industry.”
But David says a focus on trade is necessary for companies to achieve scale: “If you don’t plan to go global, then you’re really planning not to exist in the medium term, because the digital industry… [is] global by nature.” The UK already leads on digital tech innovation, with 7,500 high-growth digital tech start-ups and scale-ups that operate in international markets, according to Tech Nation.
At the same time, innovation must be balanced against regulation to build trust, so that entrepreneurs have “a legal base on which to build products that they know are going to endure”, says David.
For this to happen, it’s crucial to retain regulatory sovereignty, says Aneesh Varma. One way to do this is by setting an example: the UK is an international leader on digital regulation because of the “open and innovative” approach adopted by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which has become a “model of how to export regulation”, he says.
[See also: Pubs and cafés are back – but the UK economy will be slow to recover]
But even with a coherent digital trade strategy for areas like regulation, the UK’s ambitions could be undermined by the rising tide of protectionism. Almost a third of countries on the OECD’s Digital Trade Restrictiveness Index have become less open to trade between 2015 and 2020, compared with only 4 per cent becoming more open.
Protectionism “is the biggest threat” to the UK as it negotiates its new international relationships, says techUK’s David. “Trade is what has created the wealth that we enjoy,” he says. “[So] what we must do is make sure that countries don’t start to erect protectionist barriers, because [then] you move from what is a pretty good win-win to a lose-lose… [and] you will stifle that growth.”
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