At the first-ever QA Financial Healthcare & Insurance Forum London 2025, Simplyhealth’s Chief Technology Officer, Tim Gough, joined QA Financial CEO Matthew Crabbe for an in-depth Q&A on digital transformation, QA maturity and the rising pressures of risk and regulation across UK healthcare.
When asked about his background in software quality, Gough reflected on his seven years at Simplyhealth and explained that, “over many, many years of experience, I’ve learned the value in it and what we’re trying to get done at Simplyhealth is shift left,” he told delegates, emphasising the challenge of instilling a quality mindset in engineering teams.
“They understand what quality is. And they aren’t necessarily there to test. I explain, you’re not just testers, you are quality engineers and the gate for features to get to production.”
Gough described how the company moved from “two quite mature platforms” and a largely paper-based claims process to a digital-first model.
“We built a whole set of APIs above one of our platforms. We’ve deployed and launched our first app around five years ago. And we now achieve 80% claims automation through our technology.”
That progress, he said, began with a simple but disciplined mindset: “The first thing was taking very much a can-do attitude. Nothing’s impossible. And it’s often taking a step back and saying, how do we approach this in a different way?”
He explained that the priority was always the customer. “What you always have to remember is taking back to what the customer needs first,” he said. “They want the money back in their pockets as quickly as possible.”
That became the foundation of their early modernisation journey. “Start small and expand from there. And learn along the way.”
Gough detailed the architectural choices that allowed Simplyhealth to scale without a large development organisation.
“We’re not trying to build everything ourselves. Let’s build the key parts ourselves,” he said, “We use third-party technology wherever possible and build when there’s real ability to differentiate or add real value.”#
DORA impact
Asked by Crabbe about the broader shift driven by DORA, the AI Act, the Accessibility Act and other emerging regulatory frameworks, Gough explained, while he monitors DORA DevOps metrics to understand engineering performance, he warned against using them as external benchmarks.
“DORA allows me to compare how they’ve improved over time,” he explained. “It’s a dangerous statistic to roll up and try and benchmark against other companies.”
In quality terms, he remains focused on production outcomes: “The key ones, especially in the QA space, are production found defects and change fail.”
Looking ahead, Gough said the organisation’s priority is rapid but responsible adoption of new technologies. “The technology landscape is changing really rapidly,” he told the audience.
“Generative AI is a highly hot topic everybody wants to talk about, and it’s how do we put the things in place to allow us to maximise that.” The internal goal is cultural: “Create a culture of experimentation”
He also flagged a major integration challenge on the horizon: interoperability with the NHS. “One of the big changes we’re trying to do at the moment is integrate our customer journey,” he said.
“How do you make sure all of that data weaves together seamlessly, is really going to be our biggest technical integration challenge, and working with that NHS record.”
This Q&A with Matthew Crabbe showcased the pressures and opportunities facing healthcare insurers as they rebuild legacy platforms, strengthen QA frameworks and prepare for a new era of AI-assisted development.
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REGULATION & COMPLIANCE
Looking for more news on regulations and compliance requirements driving developments in software quality engineering at financial firms? Visit our dedicated Regulation & Compliance page here.
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