76: HealthTech Hour with Steve Roest - Episode 7676: HealthTech Hour with Steve Roest - Episode 76
UK Health Radio Podcast
Steve Roest talks with Rachel Murphy about building NHS digital services, creating and selling her company on a strict five-year plan, and launching The Grafter to support other founders. Rachel also shares her experiences of sobriety, mental health, and a debated use of psychedelics while in recovery.
55:24•5 May 2026
HealthTech, High-Stakes Exits and Staying Sober with Rachel Murphy
Episode Overview
- User-centred design that includes clinicians and patients can turn dry digital projects into meaningful healthcare services.
- Building a business with a clear five-year exit plan from day one helped Rachel focus decisions and momentum.
- Strong partnerships, including with competitors, can open doors to major contracts and future acquisition offers.
- Founder mindset matters: coachability, openness and a willingness to ask for help are key signals for future success.
- For some people in long-term recovery, carefully supervised plant medicine may be weighed as a mental health tool, though it remains controversial.
“I’ve been very open about mental health and sobriety, as you alluded to, so for me, exploring answers in different ways is not totally out of character.”
How do people find strength in their journey to sobriety while also running high-pressure businesses? This question sits quietly in the background as HealthTech Hour host Steve Roest chats with serial founder Rachel Murphy, and it gives this tech-heavy conversation an unexpectedly human edge. The episode focuses on Rachel’s route from leading major NHS digital projects, including the creation of the NHS App, through to building, scaling and selling her consultancy Difrent in a tightly planned five-year window.
She shares how user-centred design, involving clinicians, patients and multidisciplinary teams, helped turn what could have been "just another website" into a genuine digital front door for healthcare. Rachel is clear that success wasn’t about genius, but about "dogged determination and relentlessness" backed by a strong team and smart partnerships.
For founders, there’s loads of practical detail: how she positioned Difrent against the big four, why she built a sale strategy from week one, and how relationships with competitors later became the route to an eight-figure exit. She explains why coachable founders, clear revenue growth and problems that extend beyond one geography are green flags for her new venture, The Grafter, which pairs entrepreneurs with multi-exited "exiteers" to help them grow, scale and sell.
The conversation then moves into very personal territory. Rachel talks about 12 years of recovery from alcohol addiction, her openness on mental health, and the controversial decision to attend a psychedelic retreat while sober, weighing up "the benefit from a mental health perspective" against perceived risks in recovery. Her honesty will resonate strongly with anyone juggling sobriety, stress and ambition.
If you’re alcohol-free or questioning your relationship with alcohol and also building something big, this mix of health tech, hard-earned business lessons and candid talk on recovery might be exactly the perspective you’ve been looking for. What could shift for you if you treated your wellbeing with the same focus as your business goals?
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