Nobody Was Measuring the Dose: How Guesswork Is Costing the NHS £2 Billion a Year
Jason Norman is not the kind of founder who set out to build a company. Two years after finishing a PhD in liquid crystal lasers, he was in the right room at the right moment when his supervisor's decade-long work on flexible pressure sensors needed someone to take it to market. That opportunistic leap has become FlexiSense, a company developing low-cost wearable pressure sensors that could transform how the NHS treats chronic wounds. The problem FlexiSense is solving sounds almost too simple: compression therapy - wrapping a bandage around a leg to treat venous ulcers - is done entirely by feel. There is no measurement, no feedback, no right dose confirmed. Too much pressure and patients can lose a limb; too little and the wound never heals. The NHS is spending roughly £2 billion a year on wound care, with a small minority of chronic patients driving most of that cost. Jason's sensor goes under the bandage and tells clinicians exactly what is happening, quality assurance for a treatment that, right now, is pure guesswork. This conversation is about the part of the spin-out journey that nobody packages into a framework. Jason talks about discovering his real market by walking into NHS clinics and following what nurses complain about when they think no one is listening. He reflects on the difference between advice from people who have done it and advice from people who talk about it. And he shares what he would do differently put something physical in people's hands earlier, and be more honest with his team when things are not going well. It is a conversation for anyone at the early, uncertain stage of a hard tech company who wants to know what this actually looks and feels like from the inside.
