I'm in the same boat as the OP. I wonder what happened to this project, I'd be keen for an update and lessons learnt if you're still around.
I had a great idea less than 3 months ago, I'm an anaesthetist and thought of an app that could revolutionise the NHS. Spent about a month developing the idea and it turned into a beast, lots of great off shoots from the original. I pitched the idea to a company with a track record of delivering award winning apps to the NHS and they love the idea, think it has a massive market and great potential. So we've met a few times now and on that front things are going well. I've made an interactive visual mock-up of the idea to show how it would work and now they are reviewing that in order to devote resources into developing the code and graphics. The plan is to release a minimum viable product in a couple of months in my department at my hospital. Once it's being used, we'll use app data and user feedback to develop the app in the direction users want. Then once we have something a bit more polished we'll expand the user base to other specialities and beyond. The potential market for this is anyone that uses the NHS!
The side which is not going so well and is ridiculously frustrating is intellectual property. In my anaesthetic contract it says that any IP I produce belongs to my employing NHS Trust. I discovered that my hospital has an innovation division run by the hospitals clinical director no less. Then the staff in this department put me in touch with an IP company that manages their IP projects. Warning signs were already flashing at the layers of bureaucracy but I had no choice, I thought, if I try and go at this alone I would be in breach of my contract. So initially this IP company were useful they drew up an NDA which the hospital's chief exec signed and the director of the private company signed and all was good.
Recently I'm starting to question at what stage a revenue sharing deal needs to be hashed out because the app is about to start development and soon its first version will be released. One surgical colleague at work just warned me that he went down the NHS route before when he invented a product - albeit a physical one to be used during surgery. The moral of his story was this NHS IP company are useless, so he got an agreement using an IP lawyer whereby 5% of his share of revenue would go to his employing NHS trust and his product is still in development.
3 months ago I had a great idea, and my colleagues who have heard about it all think it's a brilliant idea and can't wait for it to be released. I'm happy with the development company, I like their iterative approach and their history of delivering successful products. They like the idea and are happy with me, I dedicate a lot of free time to it and have driven it from a thought in my head to an interactive model which should give coders and graphics designers an in depth perspective of what the app will do before they write a single line of code. All that said, the lack of genuine IP protection is frustrating. Half the time I just think, I wish I could make this a massive open source project and all the dreams of profiteering is just a distraction but I can't even find a decent place to pitch it open source!
I've learnt, it's hard to get ideas off the ground and from what I can tell after less than 3 months, I'm moving quite fast but I've come to appreciate that even if you are involved in 21st century innovation, you still can't shake off the old system and especially the layers of bureaucracy in the public sector. There is one solution as someone said above, learn to code but I'm already falling behind in my anaesthetic training. My colleagues might not notice but these side hobbies take a lot of time and effort and I still have a lot to learn in the day job!
So yeh, rant over! If anyone has any advice, I'm all ears.