The Healthtech Podcast #435: Hidden barriers to healthtech adoption with Saira Ghafur from Prova Health
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Feb 25, 2026 Saira Ghafur, respiratory consultant and health‑tech leader who co-founded Prova Health, shares her NHS-to-New York journey and startup pivots. She talks about generating robust evidence for digital health, practical health‑economics for startups, scaling and implementation challenges, and the regulatory and safety debates around AI in healthcare.
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Med Reg Life Taught Her Real-World Grit
- Saira described training across the UK, choosing respiratory after "going around the houses" and enduring the med reg grind that she calls character building.
- She illustrated med reg life with being bleeped about everything, even a pigeon in a patient’s room, to show the role's relentlessness and competence required.
Use Fellowships To Create Career Space
- Use fellowships to buy time and space to explore non-clinical interests like policy, quality improvement, and healthtech.
- Saira used QI and policy fellowships to step out of relentless training, meet mentors, and reframe career options before returning to clinical work.
Policy Is Mostly Behavior Change
- Policy work revealed that change is mostly behavioral and depends on aligning incentives, unintended consequences, funding and stakeholder buy-in.
- Saira stresses writing policy must consider who will enact it, how it will be paid for, and maintenance to avoid failure.