CEO Coach | Board & Strategy Advisor | Chairman & NED - Helping ambitious CEOs, Founders and Entrepreneurs develop themselves, their people, and grow their companies.

I’ve spent 25 years building and scaling successful companies - including one that captured 80% market share in 3.5 years and another that reached £60m in sales in just 20 months. 

I work alongside CEOs, Founders, Boards and Investors to help them scale themselves, their leadership and their companies.

I’ve taken ventures into 10+ countries, exited two and advised on many more. I’ve also operated at the peak of complexity within a £5 billion organisation of 75,000 employees serving 320M people.

I’ve seen what works at every stage of growth - from startup chaos to global scale. While the challenges change, the truths about leadership, performance and growth remain constant.

I’ve coached/advised over 100 CEOs, Chaired 11 Boards, and sat in the centre of venture rounds, growth heartburn, and multiple exits. 

My primary work is as a CEO Coach. Building the leadership capacity and infrastructure to scale yourself, your team, and your business with focus and measurable growth.

I also support selected companies as a Strategic Advisor or Chairman.

Strategic/Board Advisor: Strengthening systemic strategy and high-consequence decision-making to accelerate results.

Chairman or NED: Aligning vision with delivery, bringing discipline to execution, and making growth consistent at the board level.

My "industrial" home is Technology and Healthcare . But I do coach and advise CEOs, Founders, Boards and Investors from other industries (Consulting, Education, Finance, Retail etc.) as I’ve found that the "bottlenecks" are almost always human and structural before sectoral.

If you are serious about growth - yours or your company’s - and would like to explore coaching, advisory, or board support, let's have a confidential conversation.

P.S. My DM’s can get a bit crazy and I will respond faster via email - kevin+dm@kevinmcdonnell.co.

You don’t scale HealthTech. You localise it.

Every market rewrites your product strategy.

HealthTech doesn’t scale like SaaS.

It splinters.

What looks like scale on a slide deck is, in reality, dozens of duct-taped deployments.

Custom workflows.
Custom integrations.
Custom ROI logic.

In HealthTech, every “new customer” is a new market.

New procurement logic.
New clinical workflows.
New adoption psychology.

Because healthcare isn’t one system.

It’s thousands of micro-systems with different fears, funding, and friction.

Localisation is your moat.

If you can reliably adapt 70% of your solution to fit 30% chaos, faster and better than your competitors, you win.

Not because you scaled better.
But because you survived longer.

HealthTech isn’t a “scale” game. 
It’s a “stay in the game” game.

Kevin McDonnell

I help ambitious leaders and businesses unlock their potential, grow faster and be more successful. 

I'm an advisor, coach and consultant with 25+ years of experience building, growing and scaling successful market-leading companies. 

The lived experiences and approaches I've gained from over two decades of building and growing several businesses into global market leaders allow me to work alongside my clients to solve strategy, leadership, growth and business challenges. 

- From startup to several exit(s)
- Raising venture capital
- Internationalising to 10+ countries
- £60 Million of sales in just 20 months
- Scaled and captured 80% of a market in 3.5 years
- Several mergers & acquisitions
- Building high-performing teams
- Right through to £5 Billion in revenues and 75,000 people

I partner with ambitious boards, CEOs, executives and teams who want to unlock their potential and grow faster. The common themes of my work are all aligned to helping people and businesses be more successful, and I help my clients in 3 ways to catalyse meaningful change to accelerate their business and personal growth.

1. Mentoring & Coaching
2. Consulting & Strategic Advisory
3. Board Advisor & Non-Executive Director

I advise, coach and consult for the world's largest private and public companies, investors, startups and non-profits and have delivered 100's of advisory, coaching and consulting engagements across industries and around the world for companies ranging in size from early-stage to £20 Billion.

I provide longer-term support as a Non-Executive Chairman / Director or Board Advisor. I have a track record of guiding boards and mentoring and coaching CEOs and leadership teams to improve performance and deliver significant results.

As the founder and CEO of Datalla, I combine my experience and passion for technology and healthcare to help HealthTech, MedTech, Healthcare, and Technology organisations shape the future of healthcare. 

I regularly write about #leadership, #entrepreneurship, #startups, #innovation, #healthcare and #technology. If these are topics that interest you, please feel free to follow me or subscribe to my weekly newsletters:

- The Future Health → https://futurehealth.substack.com/
- The Curiosity Catalyst  → https://kevinmcdonnell.substack.com

If you want to grow your business faster, unlock your potential as a leader or make a meaningful and sustainable change, let's say hello, share perspectives and see how we can help each other.

Chairman, CEO Coach, Strategic Advisor | Helping HealthTech CEOs and Founders scale themselves, their leadership and their companies.

FDA announces it won’t regulate AI tools.

That give a single clinical recommendation.

That’s a big shift.

Startups can skip full FDA review if they meet a narrow set of criteria.

That doesn’t lower clinical risk. 

And it doesn’t get you into hospitals.

The real gate is still the people and systems around care: 

clinicians, procurement, EHR teams, legal, and risk committees.

So you’ll see two kinds of HealthTech founders:

The ones who sprint to ship “FDA-exempt” tools. 

The model tests well in isolation. Accuracy looks good. Then adoption goes to zero because the tool adds clicks, doesn’t fit the workflow, or solves the wrong problem.

The ones who slow down and ask: 

Will clinicians trust this without FDA review? Will hospital legal teams accept the liability? Will it change what people do, not just surface recommendations?

This ruling lowers the formal bar.

But it moves the burden of proof onto you.

Chairman, CEO Coach, Strategic Advisor | Helping CEOs and Founders scale themselves, their leadership and their companies.

Colleen Shannon

OpenAI just launched something that changes how 230 million people think about their health.

Two days ago, ChatGPT Health went live.

A dedicated, protected space inside ChatGPT for health and wellness conversations.

Not to diagnose.
Not to replace doctors.
But to help people understand their own health better.

Health questions are already one of the most common uses of ChatGPT.

Over 230 million people ask health or wellness questions every week.

But health data today is a mess.

Patient portals.
PDF lab reports.
Wearables.
Wellness apps.
Handwritten notes.

ChatGPT Health is designed to bring that into one secure space, where:

- Medical records and wellness apps can be connected (with permission)

- Conversations are grounded in your context, not generic advice

- Patterns can be spotted over time, not just during sick days

- You can prep better questions before seeing a clinician

Privacy is the point, not a footnote.

Health lives in a separate environment inside ChatGPT.

Encrypted at rest and in transit.

Isolated from other chats.

Not used to train OpenAI’s models.

And it wasn’t built in a vacuum.

Over 260 physicians across 60 countries have been involved.

Giving feedback on outputs hundreds of thousands of times.

Focused on clarity, safety, and knowing when to escalate to real care.

Really interesting to watch this development

Your Healthcare AI project will fail.

If you missed the usability tax.

We keep building AI tools that work in the lab but collapse in the clinic.

The problem isn't the algorithm.

It's the human cost of using it.

Brilliant technology, terrible adoption.

Clinicians abandon tools that add clicks, slow workflows, or require constant supervision. And the numbers back this up.

According to a quick search 80% of healthcare AI projects fail to move beyond pilot stage.

Not because the models are inaccurate, but because they don't fit into clinical reality.

A GP has around 9 minutes per patient. A nurse is juggling twelve tasks simultaneously.

An A&E consultant is making life-or-death decisions under pressure.

The usability tax is what clinicians pay when technology demands more effort than it saves.

Extra logins. Clunky interfaces. Outputs that need manual correction. Alerts that interrupt without adding value.

Every second of cognitive load you add is a second stolen from patient care.

And here's what most healthtech founders miss: usability isn't a design problem you solve after the AI works.

It's a clinical usability, trust and safety issue you address from day one.

Poor usability leads to workarounds. Workarounds lead to errors. Errors lead to harm.

We’ve all seen AI diagnostic tools that require clinicians to re-enter data already in the system.

Predictive models that generate alerts no one trusts. 

Documentation assistants that take longer than typing notes manually.

Each one technically functional. Each one clinically useless.

The best healthcare AI I've encountered doesn't feel like AI at all. It disappears into the workflow.

It anticipates needs. It reduces burden rather than redistributing it.

Because in healthcare, adoption isn't about features.

It's about whether a tired clinician at 11pm will choose your tool over the faster and trusted alternative.

If you haven't stress-tested your AI in real clinical conditions, with real time pressure, and real cognitive load, you haven't tested it at all.

Your technology doesn't scale at the speed of your code.

It scales at the speed of clinical trust.

Hospitals don’t adopt what’s new.

They adopt what feels safe.

We talk about:

→ New platforms
→ New algorithms
→ New funding rounds

But in healthcare, innovation doesn’t win on novelty.

It wins on trust.

You’re not just selling software.

You’re building confidence that it will work when it matters.

Because in healthcare:

→ Proof beats features
→ Evidence beats demos
→ Relationships beat roadmaps

Your biggest competitor isn’t another startup.

It’s clinical inertia, the instinct to stay with what’s known.

And the most powerful force in HealthTech isn’t innovation.

It’s integration.

If you want adoption:

→ Design for decision-makers, not just users
→ Build trust before features
→ Show outcomes before scale

HealthTech doesn’t scale because it’s brilliant.

It scales because it feels inevitable.

In HealthTech, selling a “need” is a trap.

Momentum lives in the “want.”

Founders are taught to chase “big, unmet needs.”

But here’s the reality:

Need ≠ demand.
Need ≠ budget.
Need ≠ action.

I’ve watched dozens of founders build for 'need'.

And get met with apathy.

Not because their solution didn’t work.

But because no one wanted to deal with it.

In healthcare, wants move faster than needs.

Wants are politically backed.

Wants already have budget lines.

Wants come with an operational appetite to do something now.

Needs, on the other hand?

→ Need education.
→ Need cultural rewiring.
→ Need champions willing to risk their credibility.
→ Need multi-year consensus just to get a pilot off the ground.

That’s the slow lane.

So if you’re a HealthTech founder trying to drive adoption…

Ask yourself:

Are you selling to what the system 'should' care about?

Or to what it’s already mobilised to act on?

Every CEO dreams of the exit.

The day you sign the papers. 

The cheque clears. 

The champagne flows.

But here’s the part no one tells you:

The silence afterwards is deafening.

No board.
No exec team.
No urgent fires.
No adrenaline.

It feels less like freedom and more like a void.

You’ve been defined by one role for years. 

Your identity was CEO. 

Your worth was tied to the scoreboard of ARR, growth, and valuation.

And when that disappears overnight, you’re left staring in the mirror asking, “Now what?”

This is why so many founders quietly spiral after an exit. 

They sell the company but lose themselves in the process. 

They thought money would solve it. 

Instead, they realise wealth doesn’t replace purpose.

I’ve sat with CEOs in this exact place. 

Successful on paper. 

Restless, empty, even resentful in reality.

The truth is brutal:

If you wait until after the exit to build your next identity, it’s too late.

The work starts before you sell.

Build identity capital outside the company.

Develop interests, projects, or causes that matter beyond quarterly results.

Invest in relationships that aren’t tied to your CEO badge.

Because when the deal closes, you don’t just need liquidity. 

You need relevance.

And relevance isn’t sold, acquired, or exited. 

It’s created. By you.

You knew HealthTech integration would be messy.

But you didn't expect it to consume everything.

Every HealthTech founder thinks NHS integration is a badge of credibility.

Until they try it.

Then reality hits.

Weeks lost chasing APIs.

Months rewriting documentation.

Budgets blown on compliance and testing.

All before a single patient benefits.

Integration sounds like progress.

It’s often a trap.

The hidden costs are everywhere:

Time. Each trust has a different IT setup. Nothing scales cleanly.

People. You need engineers who understand legacy systems built decades ago.

Money. Every interface adds maintenance costs that never go away.

Focus. You can end up building for bureaucracy, not users.

The founders who survive this shift their strategy early.

They prove value through pilots that stand alone.

They partner with trusts that already have modern infrastructure.

And they negotiate integration as phase two, not the entry ticket.

Integration isn’t bad.

It’s just expensive leverage, and you should treat it that way.

Before you commit to it, ask yourself one question:

“Will this integration create revenue or just reputation?”

What’s been your biggest surprise trying to integrate with the NHS?

A pilot success at one NHS Trust creates the illusion of scale. I'm sorry, but there is no such thing as copy and paste in healthcare.

Every HealthTech founder has fallen for this.

One Trust signs off.
The pilot runs beautifully.
The clinicians love it.
The outcomes shine.

You’re told: “This is it. Let’s scale.”

But that pilot wasn’t proof of product–market fit. It was proof of a relationship, a local champion, a moment in time.

The data flows differently
The clinicians behave differently
It doesn’t plug into the next one’s infrastructure
The politics, incentives, and blockers are entirely new

Your case study travels. Your product doesn’t.
What worked in Nottingham won’t work in Newcastle
What worked in Oxford won’t work in Oban

And what worked in the NHS won’t land in Germany, or France, or the US - no matter how “validated” you think it is.

This is why HealthTech scale isn’t about rollout.
It’s about adaptation. Localisation. Re-architecture.
Over. And over. And over again.

There is no single “user”.
There is no single “system”.

You are not scaling a product.
You are managing a portfolio of clinical, technical, and political ecosystems.

Don’t mistake local success for universal relevance.

Instead of asking:
“How do we replicate this win?”

Ask:
“What made this win possible here, and what’s missing elsewhere?”

That’s where real scale lives:

Not in repeating success.
But in rebuilding it, with eyes wide open.

The best HealthTech leaders scale pattern recognition.

They look for what must change, what can change, and what must not.

Here's what makes HealthTech fundamentally different:

You're selling to institutions, not individuals.

Hospitals, insurers, and regulators don't move fast. 

Their decisions aren't driven by hype or momentum.

They're driven by risk mitigation, compliance frameworks, and institutional inertia.

If you're pitching like you would to a VP of Sales at a SaaS company, you've already lost.

Trust is non-negotiable.

In healthcare, one misstep - clinical, ethical, or regulatory - destroys credibility overnight.

There's no "move fast and break things" here. Break something, and you're done.

Your reputation isn't a marketing asset. It's your entire market access strategy.

Adoption is an uphill battle with no shortcuts.

Clinicians are overworked. Patients are overwhelmed. Procurement cycles are brutal.

If your product doesn't fit seamlessly into existing workflows, it won't get used.

And if it doesn't get used, it doesn't matter how elegant your tech is.

Integration isn't a feature. It's survival.

So how do you survive?

Act like a healthcare company.

Learn the regulations. Build trust with providers. Design for safety over speed. This isn't about slowing down - it's about understanding the terrain you're operating in.

If you don't know what HIPAA, MDR, or FDA pathways mean for your product roadmap, you're gambling with your business.

Solve a critical problem.

"Nice-to-have" solutions don't last in healthcare. If no one is desperate for your product - if it doesn't solve a painful, urgent, measurable problem - rethink your idea.

Healthcare doesn't reward innovation for innovation's sake. It rewards outcomes.

Validate relentlessly.

Evidence wins. Clinical studies, peer-reviewed research, and real-world results matter more than press coverage or investor hype.

If you can't prove efficacy, you can't scale trust. And without trust, well you know...

HealthTech is not a place for fast hacks or growth-at-all-costs mindsets.

It's a place for those who play the long game.

You don't need to move slower.

You need to move smarter.

The UK’s most sensitive infrastructure could change hands. Again…

Private equity giant TPG is reportedly in talks with UnitedHealth Group in a £1.4 billion deal for OptumUK. 

If you aren't familiar with the name, you’re definitely familiar with their reach. 

OptumUK own EMIS, the software managing data for the majority of England’s GPs.

And this touches the very core of the UK's healthcare infrastructure.

Healthcare data is national infrastructure. 

When the systems managing our health records change hands, it raises critical questions about innovation, data interoperability, and long-term stability for the NHS.

High switching costs and "sticky" software make these assets catnip for private equity, but I’m sure the regulatory eyes will be watching closely to ensure patient care remains the priority.

Is this the start of a massive consolidation wave in European HealthTech for 2026? 

Or does private equity ownership of critical NHS infrastructure raise too many red flags?

I see the same mistake repeated in almost every NHS sales strategy.

Teams, boards and investors prepare for selling.

They do not prepare for silence.

It’s easy to believe NHS sales is about process.

- Frameworks.
- Procurement stages.
- Evidence packs.

But in reality the hardest part of selling to the NHS is not the process.

It is the silence.

Months of it.

No clear “no”.
No clear “yes”.

Just long gaps where nothing moves, and no one explains why.

Your team asks for updates.
You have none.

Your board asks for confidence.
You manufacture it.

Your investors want momentum.
You offer patience dressed up as strategy.

The NHS sales cycle transfers emotional risk onto the supplier.

The system is protecting itself.
You are absorbing the uncertainty.

I’ve watched strong, rational CEOs, boards and investors start doubting their judgement (and the opportunity) during this phase.

Not because the product is weak.
But because prolonged ambiguity erodes conviction.

This is what no one prepares you for.

You are not selling innovation.
Tiy are not selling a product.
You are not selling a platform.

You are asking an overstretched system to trust you while it is srambking to serves patients.

That creates fear.
Fear creates delay.
Delay creates silence.

The founders who survive this do something counterintuitive.

They narrate reality internally with brutal honesty.
Not optimism.
Not spin.
Just truth.

“This will take longer than feels reasonable. Growth will be lumpy with lots of twists and turns. And that’s normal.”

And most importantly.

They stop personalising the delay.

The NHS is not rejecting you.
It is surviving itself.

If you are selling into the NHS right now and feel unusually tired, distracted, or heavy.

That is just exposure to prolonged uncertainty.

Selling to the NHS is nore about about staying psychologically intact...  long enough for trust to form.

J.P. Morgan’s Q4 2025 Medtech Licensing and Venture Report shows exits rebounded in 2025, with IPO and M&A volumes beating 2024. 

Venture funding reached $11.3bn across 323 rounds, skewing later stage. 

Licensing value hit $10.0bn, mostly milestone-based, while two megadeals drove $44.6bn M&A and improved public-market access for US listings.

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