Well, by having a company, e.g. a Limited, you could accumulate money there and pay you a salary. The salary could be quite constant while the company may have month with a lot of revenue and others with poor revenue.
I worked for a few very large Healthcare companies in the US… and EVERY vendor that we had contracts with, those contracts included clauses that WE could READ any data they collected for their apps, and THEY had to provide all the techincal details so we could transform the data into systems of our own as required for additional analysis. The rationale was… ITS OUR DATA,
Any vendor that was unwilling to abide by that clause was no longer considered for any future contract bids.
Actually, the OWNER of the data is the PATIENT.
In Europe he signs a form that for example allows the hospital doctor to pass the data on to his private physician, and if someone else wants the data (eg for medical studies) that again requires consent from the patient, and in those cases the data have to be anonymised (eg the company doesnt get the patients name and address, if they want to contact the patient the doctor has to pass on the request). But at any stage the patient controls his/her data.
Yes that is technically true… .for Patient medical records… but that wasn’t the point I was trying to make… the point being that the 3rd party software vendor could not preclude the client (the Healthcare company) from accessing and using data contained within a database created by that vendors software. And don’t forget, there is more to healthcare than just Patient data, there is all the providers (including hospitals), their demographics, their specialites, their education, degrees, sanctions etc.
And also, Patient data is still restricted from the Patient in some cases… The doctor might release the results of specific tests (A1C etc), but is not obligated to release any comments, notes or communications with other providers
and there are Patient Information protocols in the US as well… HIPPA (Health Information Patient Protection Act [I think])
HIPPA=Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
but I like mine better 
You can try to reduce the time you work in your current fulltime job to the required minimum to make a living. For example: You would only work 30 hours (instead of 40 hours) a week in your current job and you work 10 hours a week to carefully build up your new business as a developer/consultant. This way you can keep the risks very low. I am currently trying this route.
“Hey Boss!, I’m only going to come in 4 days a week… I’m sure you are Ok with that right?”
And even if they were (not likely)… it would probably result in loss of most if not all benefits (healthcare etc)
and do not disclose that to your boss or your coworkers
I would be extremely cautious about the medical software market. In the US, it’s not really an open market and there are many expensive legal hurdles. Medical software systems are a market with purchasers who don’t care about end-user experience. The end-users have little power affecting software choice. IT never has to actually struggle with how slow or awkward an EHR is to use. They just care about how much support it costs IT. Admin cares about what IT costs, not how hard it is for the MD’s. Making it work is the end users’ problem. That in a nutshell is the medical software market.
If you are already big enough to influence government officials, it’s great. Here we, have monopoly through legislation crafted to effectively freeze out competitors. I don’t know if it’s the same in the UK. It’s an uphill climb. Foolishly we answered the call for innovation in EHR’s. We built an extremely fast and user friendly anesthesia EHR. Ours works beautifully, and has done so for 10’s of thousands of anesthetics, but commercially, we were frozen out of the market even before we started.
Medical projects <— big red flag.