The Healthtech Podcast

Steve Burnell is managing director of Tenmile, the health technology and biotech investment business Andrew and Nicola Forrest's Tattarang set up with a 250 million dollar allocation. He is also a PhD marine ecologist who spent his twenties putting satellite trackers on right whales and making natural history documentaries, then spent fourteen years in big pharma, latterly running digital patholog...

Ross Drynan has spent twelve years at the intersection of technology and healthcare, almost all of it in go to market, including building the go to market that took a small dental software company to international market leadership. He now runs We Don't Consult, which despite the name is a consultancy, working with clinicians becoming founders, SaaS companies stuck after their first few percent of...

Nader Alaghband co-founded Ampersand Health with two NHS gastroenterologists, Dr Gareth Parkes and Dr Bu Hayee, and has spent about eight years building it. His argument here is uncomfortable and worth hearing. Too much of a hospital appointment is spent on the things doctors care about, and not enough on the things patients care about. People living with Crohn's and colitis do not measure the...

Dr Nikita Kanani MBE is Global Medical Director at Neko Health and still a practising NHS GP. Before Neko she was medical director for primary care at NHS England, through the pandemic and the vaccine rollout, and she and Dr James Somauroo start there because it explains everything that comes after. She is precise about what those years were actually like. Two or three in the morning on Teams in h...

Deborah Cohen is a medically qualified investigative journalist, formerly science editor at ITV News and health correspondent at BBC Newsnight, where she led the programme's COVID coverage. Her book, "Bad Influence: How the Internet Hijacked Our Health", shortlisted for the Royal Society science book prize, started from one question: are influencers making us sick? She spoke to more than 200 peopl...

This week, James is joined by Dr Sai Narimetla, an A&E doctor who simultaneously works in investment banking at SSG Capital, to ask why healthtech hasn't produced the exits that biotech and medical devices have. They get into fragmentation, why the deals that are happening don't make headlines, and what a clinical lens actually adds when you're diligencing a company. Connect with S...

Martin Ratz co-founded Doccla after a heart attack at forty-four that he had no reason to have. Lying in a hospital bed in Stockholm, he noticed something obvious. Inside the building you are monitored constantly, and the minute you leave, nobody is watching at all. He and Dr James Somauroo trace what Doccla became from there. A research study at Northampton General that COVID shut down, then a vi...

This week, James is joined by Dr Kapil Savania, Medical Lead at Voy (formerly Manual) and a practising NHS GP, for a candid look at the fast-blurring line between healthcare and wellness. They dig into who should own preventative medicine, what TRT actually is — and where it gets abused — and why "fat loss," not weight loss, has to be the goal in the GLP-1 era. It's an honest conversation about ho...

This week, James is joined by Yasir Sacranie, pharmacist, content creator and founder of MicroPharm, the education platform helping thousands of trainee pharmacists pass their registration exam. Yasir talks candidly about bootstrapping a healthcare education business alongside a demanding NHS role, the family moment that finally pushed him to leave the NHS for good, and why he's deliberately keepi...

In this episode of The Healthtech Podcast, James is joined by Professor Reza Razavi, Professor of Paediatric Cardiovascular Science at King's College London and CEO of Fraiya, an AI ultrasound software company. Reza shares the deeply personal story behind Fraiya — including his own daughter's near-fatal undiagnosed heart condition as a newborn — and explains how AI applied to the routine 20-week a...

In this episode of The Healthtech Podcast, James is joined by Steve Bulera, Chief Scientific Officer for Safety Assessment and Toxicology at Charles River Laboratories — one of the world's largest CROs, and a company that almost every new drug passes through on its way from lab to human trials. They dig into one of the most significant shifts in preclinical drug development: the move away from tra...

In this episode of The Healthtech Podcast, James is joined by Jamie Cox, Co-Founder and CTO of Scarlet — Europe's only notified body specialised in software and AI medical devices. Jamie shares how a frustrating experience building AI triage software at Babylon Health led him and co-founder James Dewar to a radical idea: build a notified body from the ground up, designed specifically for iterative...

This week, James is joined by Shravan Nageswaran, co-founder and CEO of Atman Labs, the London applied-AI research company building diagnostic AI that reasons like a doctor — without relying on large language models. They dig into why LLMs fall short on real clinical reasoning, what "safety" actually means when a system takes a patient history, and how reinforcement learning over a medical knowled...

In this episode, James is joined by Cate Lawrence, Senior Journalist at Tech.eu, to explore what the European healthtech ecosystem actually looks like from the press box, how stories get chosen, what makes a startup worth covering, and why the data gap between innovation and clinical impact remains so wide. Cate brings a decade of cross-sector reporting to the conversation, from wearable tech and...

This week, James is joined by Ben Finlay, Partner at Stratt and Advisor to Ranvier.ai, to dig into why mental health is still diagnosed by questionnaire - and what a taste test, a blood biomarker and a continuum view of neurological wellness could change. Ben shares the science behind Ranvier's objective mood measurement, the journey from early intervention in depression through to staving off Alz...

This week, James is joined by Professor Shafi Ahmed — Consultant Surgeon at the Royal London Hospital, futurist, and author of Intelligent: The Evolution of AI Transforming Healthcare — for a candid look at what it actually takes to innovate inside a system designed to resist change. From streaming a live colectomy on Google Glass to 14,500 students in 118 countries, to walking away from 80% of hi...

This week, James is joined by Dr Tom Chambers, anaesthetist and Co-founder & Chief Medical Officer of Theta Sleep, to unpack why an estimated 9.2 million people in the UK are living with undiagnosed sleep apnoea. They get into why sleep medicine is so fragmented, why CPAP has an image problem, and how shifting diagnosis and treatment into the home could fix a supply-and-demand crisis the NHS i...

This week, James is joined by Dr Sujitha Selvarajah, co-founder of Hesta Health, who recently closed a £2M pre-seed round to rebuild postnatal care from the ground up. They get into why most of the women's health gap has nothing to do with reproductive health, why new mothers are abandoned at the moment their care needs spike, and what it actually takes to build healthcare that's both clin...

In this episode, James is joined by Ranjan Singh, who built HealthHero by acquiring six companies in nine months during lockdown. Now covering 35 million patients across four countries and delivering nearly five million consultations a year, it's Europe's largest digital clinic, with three consecutive outstanding CQC ratings to back up the scale. In this episode, he talks James through the acquisi...

This week, James is joined by Dr Kishan Rees, Senior Director for Global Video & Digital Content Strategy at Bayer, to unpack why healthcare's communication problem is now its biggest patient-safety problem. They get into medical misinformation, why patients are turning to AI chatbots over clinicians, and what pharma can learn from broadcast journalism. Connect with Kishan: https://www.linkedi...

This week, James is joined by Dr Tiril Elstad, medical doctor, yoga teacher, and founder and CEO of Endor Global, to explore why chronic stress may be our generation's biggest health risk - and why most wearables are making the problem worse. They get into the science of heart rate variability, the gap between data and actual behaviour change, and why the real opportunity in preventive health...

This week, James is joined by Dr Clare Palmer, Director of Evidence Generation at ieso, to explore what happens when AI is purpose-built for mental health care - and why that's worlds apart from people typing their problems into ChatGPT. They discuss ieso's safety-constrained AI architecture, the striking fact that only half of people with depression or anxiety recover, and how agentic AI...

This week, James is joined by Ahmed Binesmael, Senior Improvement Analyst at the Health Foundation, to dig into what the British public actually thinks about AI in healthcare - and why the people most likely to benefit from healthtech are often the most sceptical of it. They explore the Health Foundation's latest survey data on trust, the NHS app's "doctor in your pocket" function, and why meaning...

In this episode, James is joined by Robert Bunn, Founder and President of Ultrasound AI, who shares an extraordinary story - from multiple failed startups and personal tragedy to building an AI that can predict actual delivery dates from standard ultrasound images. With a De Novo FDA clearance now in hand, Robert explains how the technology works, what the AI discovered that clinicians couldn't se...

This week, James is joined by Dr Yath Prem, Medical Advisor at Flo Health and clinical product specialist, to talk about the growing wave of NHS doctors moving into healthtech - what's driving it, whether content creators are encouraging too many to leave, and what clinical product actually means in practice. They also dig into wearables, AI health assistants, and whether healthtech is genuine...