ViiV Healthcare set out to make HIV and STI testing something anyone in Germany could do, privately and reliably, wherever they lived. They asked me to help take that from a single region to a whole country.
The company that only does HIV
ViiV Healthcare isn't a generalist drugmaker with an HIV product line. It's a global company within the GSK group that does only one thing: HIV. It exists to advance treatment, prevention and care for people living with and at risk of HIV, and, unusually, its remit explicitly extends to supporting the communities affected rather than simply supplying medicine to them. That matters here, because a project like SAM Health only makes sense for an organisation that thinks that broadly. Testing is the front of the entire HIV journey: nobody gets treated, and no one is protected from onward transmission, until they know their status. So when ViiV chose to sponsor SAM Health — funding it as a public-health initiative delivered with Deutsche Aidshilfe, Germany's federal AIDS organisation, rather than as a commercial product of its own — it was backing the unglamorous, decisive question the whole field depends on: how do you actually get more people tested, earlier?
I came to it through Christina Nesheva, who led the innovation work and brought me in specifically for the shape of this challenge. It was late 2019, and the brief sat exactly where my background was useful: I'd just come out of building people.io, where I'd spent years living at the intersection of policy, regulation, product and technology around sensitive personal data — which is more or less the exact corner SAM Health operates in. It was the engagement directly before I started FORTYEIGHT.ai, and, as it turned out, the last major piece of work I'd finish before the pandemic changed everything. Christina's read was that this particular mix of constraints needed someone who'd actually built a regulated, data-sensitive product rather than just advised on one, and that's the seat I filled.
A test at home, a lab behind it, a person on the line
SAM Health is a digital platform built around a real clinical service. You order privately online, take your own sample at home, and post it to a certified laboratory for proper analysis, with human support wrapped around it from trained counsellors at Deutsche Aidshilfe's network of local checkpoints, before you start and again when your result arrives. It was the first service in Germany to bring those three things together: the privacy and convenience of testing at home, the reliability of a certified lab rather than a self-read strip, and real, stigma-free counselling from people who do this every day. That combination is what set it apart, and it was designed deliberately for the people the clinic-based system reaches least well: those for whom distance, time, or the simple fear of being recognised turns "I should get tested" into "not yet." Reaching them earlier is how late diagnoses become early ones.
One of the strictest privacy regimes on earth
What makes this a genuinely hard and absorbing piece of consulting isn't the website. It's everything the website has to live inside. This was a cross-sector undertaking with a global pharmaceutical company, a national charity in Deutsche Aidshilfe, the clinical self-sampling specialists SH:24, and technology partners all in the same room, each with their own obligations and pace. It ran in Germany, which operates one of the strictest data-protection regimes anywhere in the world: entirely appropriate when the data in question is someone's HIV status, and a serious discipline to design within. And it sat right at the edge of Germany's evolving rules on telemedicine and remote diagnostics, where what is permissible is still being defined. Scaling a health service through that combination is a different kind of problem from launching a consumer app. Every decision has a clinical, legal and human dimension at once, and the craft is in moving the service forward without ever treating any of those as an afterthought.
Most people arrive here alone, at night
Of everything in the scale-up, the part that mattered most — and that people most often underestimate — was how someone actually finds a service like this. They rarely respond to an advert. Far more often it's a private moment, frequently late and alone, when someone decides to quietly look for a way to find out where they stand. If the service isn't there at that moment, in language that meets them without judgement, that quiet resolve can pass. So search wasn't a marketing channel here; it was the front door to the whole service, and we built the strategy around treating it that way. We moved the service to a new home at samhealth.de, rebuilt it around how people genuinely search for sensitive health information, and made a deliberate choice to invest in durable, organic visibility rather than rented attention. There was a rare opening to do that well: because no commercial operator was meaningfully competing for these terms in Germany, a trusted, non-commercial service could earn that space honestly and hold it, drawing on the established authority of a partner like Deutsche Aidshilfe rather than buying clicks that vanish the moment the budget stops. Benchmarked against a keyword audit by Performance.io, SAM Health moved onto the first page for the searches that decide whether a worried person finds real help or a dead end.
Fewer reasons to put it off
The work moved the whole funnel, not just the top of it. Against the regional starting point, national awareness, the number of people beginning the registration journey, and completed orders all rose substantially, and, just as importantly, the quality of reach improved at the same time, with a markedly higher share of kits going to people testing for the first time while keeping the focus firmly on those genuinely at risk. Some of the most useful gains came from removing small frictions with care: a clearer brand on a faster, simpler site lifted the proportion of visitors who began to register, and replacing a required in-person consultation with a compliant phone consultation meaningfully increased the number who completed an order. None of that is growth-hacking. It is the patient, considered removal of the barriers that sit between an anxious person and an answer they need, which in this category is the entire game.
The part that has nothing to do with metrics
It would be easy to overstate my part in this, so I won't: SAM Health is the work of many hands, and its real authors are the clinicians, counsellors and partner organisations who run it — Christina Nesheva and Jeff French on the ViiV side, the team at Deutsche Aidshilfe, the clinical minds at SH:24, and Pim Preston, whose brand work shaped how the whole thing felt to the people it was trying to reach. My job was to take a proven idea and help it reach a national scale without losing what made it work — the brand and platform, the way people find and move through it, and the operational and regulatory groundwork underneath. What makes it one of the engagements I value most has nothing to do with metrics. It's that the thing those metrics describe is people, more of them, finding out their status earlier, more privately, and with less fear than the old routes allowed. In HIV, earlier is everything. Getting to play a part in widening that door, for a company and a community genuinely trying to close the gap, is about as meaningful as this work gets.