What Primary Care Ready taught us about general practice

Three days in Bristol with Health Innovation West of England and One Care, and the lessons we're bringing home.

Earlier this year we shared that Silvia Health had been accepted onto Primary Care Ready, the accelerator programme run by Health Innovation West of England in partnership with One Care, the GP federation supporting 66 practices across Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire. In October, founder and CEO Amy Wild spent three intensive days in Bristol on the programme. Here's what we learned.

Who is your customer?

It sounds like a simple question. In the NHS, it's one of the hardest.

In primary care, the person who uses a product, the person who benefits from it and the person who pays for it are almost never the same. Get that wrong, and even a brilliant product goes nowhere.

So we pulled Silvia apart and put it back together, audience by audience. The patient. The clinician. The person holding the budget. What does each of them actually need from us?

The line we're holding on to: lead with the problem, not the features. Nobody buys a platform. They buy a fix for the thing that keeps them up at night.

Evidence first

Day three was all about the business case, and it started with evidence.

Real-world evaluation isn't something you bolt on at the end. It needs building in from day one. Start with the problem, and make sure it's a problem the system actually wants solved. Know your baseline, or you'll never be able to show what changed.

Then came bid writing, and a crash course in what NHS evaluators really look for. Answer exactly what's asked. Back every claim with evidence. Show how it will be delivered, what could go wrong, and how success will be measured. And remember that a place on a procurement framework gets you in the room, but it doesn't guarantee a single sale.

Practices buy change, not software

The biggest reflection of the week was this. Practices don't just buy software. They buy change.

A GP partner loving your product doesn't mean you've made the sale. Making it easy for the whole practice to say yes does.

That's shaping how we talk to practices about Silvia. Not just what the platform does, but what it asks of the practice, who it helps, and how it fits into the way they already work.

Thank you

A huge thank you to Alex Leach, Morgan Daly, Mohua Siddique and the whole team at Health Innovation West of England and One Care. It was a demanding, generous and genuinely useful programme, and exactly the stress-test we wanted.

About Silvia Health

Silvia Health is a structured triage support platform for menopause care, built around NICE NG23 guidance. The practice or clinic sets the triage rules. Patients complete a structured pre-assessment before their appointment, and Silvia organises it into a clinician-facing summary. Patients are invited back for structured check-ins at 3, 6 or 12 months, at an interval the practice sets, so each follow-up builds on the last. Every decision stays with the clinician.