Big Picture Medicine

Sir Bruce Keogh was National Medical Director for over a decade — leading clinical policy and strategy as well as being responsible for clinical leadership, quality and innovation. Sir Bruce was a celebrated cardiac surgeon prior to this, and during his tenure as Medical Director — he was most notably responsible for making clinical outcomes the currency of the NHS. He has been declared the most i...

How does a doctor start working for DeepMind/Google? 🤖  Joe Ledsam is a Clinician Scientist at Google Japan after formerly working at DeepMind. He started his career off as a doctor, before migrating to research and eventually coming to his current position. He’s worked on some of the most influential medical deep learning papers to date — published in the likes of Nature. For many nerds in...

Dr Simon Eccles is the Chief Clinical Information Officer for Health and Care and Deputy CEO of NHS X. Amongst many responsibilities, he’s accountable for delivery of the Personal Health and Care 2020 programme, and the central expenditure for the NHS’s IT. Whilst doing all of this, he also practices one day a week as a Consultant in Emergency Medicine. He’s funny, he’s opinionated, he has a stron...

Why should doctors learn how to code? Josh is really cool. He’s an Australian doctor on a big mission — to empower medics with code. Josh recently released Code Blue: An Introduction to Programming for Doctors . I highly, highly recommend picking this up for a 0–100 guide on coding for medics: https://gum.co/NMtSD   We talk about why you should learn how to code as a medic — but then I push b...

Where are the dark horses in medical AI? 🐴  Professor Geraint Rees is the Dean of the Faculty of Life Sciences at UCL, Pro-Vice-Provost of AI and is also the director of UCL Business — its technology transfer arm. His research is primarily in cognitive neuroscience and he has been cited over 35,000 times with a h index of 93. He sits at the intersection of academia, technology and business —...

Do we want a Silicon Valley for healthcare? Professor Tony Young is the National Clinical Director for Innovation at NHS England, co-founder of the UK’s £500M MedTech Campus, founder of the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme and a consultant urological surgeon. Tony was awarded an OBE for services to clinical leadership in the 2019 New Year Honours List. Tony has recently opened applications for...

A paper published in the Lancet Digital Health found that less than 1% of clinical AI studies reviewed were of sufficient quality to have confidence in their results. This is a huge problem. Dr Xiao Liu and Professor Alastair Denniston are part of the team who published that study — and to tackle this this problem — they have today published the first international standards for the reporting of c...

What's it like running a company which has raised $90M? Dr Ben Maruthappu is the co-founder and CEO of Cera Care — a technology enabled home care company. I could speak about Ben’s achievements and accolades for hours, but to give you a whistle stop tour — he is a successful doctorpreneur, has published some very influential papers, and has worked in health policy — perhaps most notably — he was a...

Do you need to be a silverback gorilla to be a good leader? 🦍  Professor David Lomas is the Vice Provost (Health) at University College London and Head of UCL Medical School. He is also a hugely accomplished academic with his most notable work focusing on alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency. He has a h-index of 95. We talk about lots of things — like the future of medical education,  what ma...

Do you want the granular step-by-step on how to launch your own MedTech startup? Dr Krishan Ramdoo was an ENT Surgeon before co-founding TympaHealth; the world’s first all in one hearing health assessment system. It’s essentially a digital otoscope (a scope that helps visualise inside the ear). Traditionally this was an analogue device, so no one else could see what you saw when you examined the e...

What does the future radiologist look like? What does everyone get wrong when regulating their AI startup? Dr Hugh Harvey trained as a consultant radiologist and is now the managing director of Hardian Health; a health-tech consultancy firm. He has had an incredible career, sitting at the interface of Medicine and technology. He was headhunted by Dr Eric Topol to co-chair the Topol Review, he sits...

You're an average medical student with no connections — how do you get published!? *Congratulations to Azeem who was awarded the British Empire Medal for services to Medical Education during COVID-19* Dr Azeem Alam completed his surgical AFP training in London and is the co-founder of BiteMedicine — the medical knowledge platform. He shares his step-by-step framework on getting published without a...

How can a surgeon assist in an operation across the world — using their web browser? Dr Nadine Hachach-Haram BEM is a plastic surgeon and CEO of Proximie — an augmented reality platform for virtual surgical collaboration. Rather than telemedicine it’s about telepresence. It means that a surgeon in the UK could open up their web browser, and see what another surgeon across the world is doing in rea...

How could better understanding your internal state improve your mental health? Dr David Plans is a lecturer in Organisational Neuroscience and CEO of BioBeats; a company on a mission to free people from mental suffering. He’s completing his second PhD in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and has raised over $6M to turn his academic research into a bustling company. This is a real...

Professor Shafi Ahmed is the world’s most watched surgeon.  He has live-streamed operations using Google Glass, the Snapchat Spectacles — and even virtual reality technology. He’s really at the cutting edge of surgical innovation so it was a real privilege to speak to him. He is the co-founder of Medical Realities ; a company which specialises in surgical VR and AR tech. He has spoken at Wire...

How do you enact systems-level change within the NHS? Dr Owain Hughes was an ENT registrar before he decided to do something bold: fix NHS referrals. But systems-level solutions aren't as simple as just making an app... here's how Cinapsis did it. Find Dr Owain Hughes: Cinapsis: https://www.cinapsis.org Twitter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/owainrhyshughes You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan...

What would you be working on if you were a medical student today? Dr Eric Topol is in the top 10 most cited doctors in the history of Medicine. He is a cardiologist, geneticist and digital medicine expert — and was commissioned by the UK’s Health Secretary to write a report to prepare the NHS for the digital future: The Topol Review. Dr Topol has three best selling books on the future of Medicine:...

How do you forge your own career path as a doctor? Dr James Somauroo is a former anaesthetics/ICU doctor and the founder of the healthtech agency: somX. He writes for Forbes and is also the host of the Health-tech podcast — the biggest podcast in this space with listeners in over 100 countries. Find Dr James Somauroo: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-somauroo/ The Health-tech Podcast: h...

How did a Paediatrician become the Managing Director of NHS Services at Babylon Health?  We talk about Umang's advice for medics entering the business world, how to keep your clinical job, Babylon's validation and some incredible advice on crafting your own story. —————— Find Dr Umang Patel: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drumangpatel/ You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subs...

How do you achieve peak performance as a medical student, doctor or clinical academic? Professor Neil Sebire works at the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London — the country's leading childrens' research hospital. He's published over 700 peer reviewed papers, has a h-index of 88 and 32,000+ citations. Here's everything he's learnt along the way. —————— Find Professor Sebire: LinkedIn: https://www...

Cellen is bringing medical cannabis to UK patients. I spoke to Dr Benjamin Viaris de Lesegno who is a French-trained NHS doctor as well as the co-founder and CMO of Cellen. The first half of this conversation covers the landscape of medical cannabis in the UK and its clinical need. We then talk about Benjamin's advice for fellow doctorpreneurs — and why 45 might be the best age to found your start...

How do you run a successful startup and code academy — all whilst completing your final year at Imperial College Medical School? Harvinder Power is the co-founder and CEO of Motics — a company which brings physiotherapy into the digital era. He was the winner at the Kickstart Global Incubator, the McKinsey Venture Academy, the UCL VC Fund amongst many other accolades. In this conversation, I tease...

Ali has reached medic nirvana. He has over 770,000 YouTube subscribers, a successful business ( 6med ), one of my favourite podcasts ( Not Overthinking It ) and is an all round wise man. He's managed to diversify so that Medicine is not his livelihood — it's a hobby he can approach on his own terms. His content started with advice for prospective and fledgling medical students — although he has no...

How do you convert an idea in medical school into a company that just raised $11M and has over 1 million users? Sarim, Yusuf and Maroof were three medical students at Imperial College London. They wanted to help people quit smoking  by delivering gold-standard addiction therapy digitally. Fast forward to today and they’ve expanded across the Atlantic and have over 1 million users, as well as...

What's management consulting really like (all expensed trips to Vegas)!? How do you get your digital health solution into the NHS? And why do so many world-class performers have a performance/executive coach? This week's episode was a lot of fun, and you're going to love it if you want to hear advice from a super accomplished doctorpreneur . Dr Charlotte Lee is the UK director at Big Health, who g...