Big Picture Medicine

Stephen Bourke is the co-founder of Echo; the online pharmacy. If you haven’t heard of Echo, it’s a bit like Deliveroo for your medication. It delivers repeat prescriptions to your door, free of charge and hassle-free. It was acquired by McKesson, the group who own Lloyds Pharmacy in 2019. This is a really valuable conversation and Stephen is hilarious, honest and gives a tasty inside scoop into the world of online pharmacy. We talk about how to improve patient adherence, how Echo rose to the top despite not being the first company of its kind by a long shot, Stephen’s experience of making something cool but also accessible and how sometimes — you need to listen to all your friend’s advice, nod your head — and then ignore it all to take a big leap. You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

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 influential clinician in the NHS by the Health Service Journal for three years and was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2003. Honestly, I was nervous about speaking to someone of Sir Bruce’s stature. Fortunately, he is one of the kindest people I’ve interviewed — and I’m really happy to have captured his leadership philosophy, how he made decisions and decided what was important as Medical Director, and his life advice for medics with similar aspirations. You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

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 Medicine — he’s living the dream. He was recommended to me by Pearse Keane who I spoke to on episode #10, who described him as simply exceptional. We talk about how Joe started working for DeepMind and then Google, how he actively seeks out fields he’s uncomfortable with, how the Simpsons influenced his life philosophy, why he wakes up at 2am and what he believes — are the dark horses in this field. You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

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 strong vision and he gives wonderful insight into what it’s like as a doctor policymaker. He talks about what he’s learned along the way, electronic health records, his views on blockchain and what he took away from his time at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

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 back and challenge Josh — I ask him why you should bother learning how to code when a) no doctor I’ve spoken to in MedTech actually codes much themselves and b) when today, there are so many good no-code solutions out there Finally Josh explains how to start coding for two very different types of medics: Firstly, the hustler, the entrepreneur, the person who doesn’t care about the tools or computers — they just want to build their next startup. Secondly, he explains the path for the academic, who wants to understand the nuts and bolts, build their own models, publish papers and work with companies like DeepMind/Google Health. I hope you enjoy. Find Josh Twitter: @_JoshCase https://twitter.com/_JoshCase You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

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 — so he has a really rich, birds eye perspective on MedTech. I asked him which areas of AI in Medicine don’t get enough attention, the role of private companies in research and whether you need to work disproportionately hard to reach the upper echelons of a field. You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

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 the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur programme. Apply here: https://www.england.nhs.uk/aac/what-we-do/how-can-the-aac-help-me/clinical-entrepreneur-training-programme/ This is a really fun conversation — we cover Tony’s story, how and if the UK can make a Silicon Valley for healthcare and how to be charismatic. You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

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 clinical AI trials. These are called SPIRIT-AI and CONSORT-AI and have today been published in Nature Medicine, the Lancet Digital Health and the BMJ. The goal of these guidelines is to improve the quality of clinical AI studies and increase their transparency. We talk about the general quality problem in clinical AI research, we talk about their guidelines and some of the recommendations within them — and also about what the future of clinical AI validation looks like. Papers Nature Medicine CONSORT-AI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-1034-x SPIRIT-AI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-1037-7 The Lancet Digital Health CONSORT-AI: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(20)30218-1/fulltext SPIRIT-AI: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(20)30219-3/fulltext BMJ CONSORT-AI: https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3164 SPIRIT-AI: https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3210

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 an advisor to Simon Stevens (CEO of NHS England). Ben was awarded an MBE for services to Health and Care technology in the 2020 Queen’s New Year Honours List. We talk about how Ben got to where he is along with what he learned at every step. We also dive quite deep into what it’s actually like to be CEO of such a large company. This is one of my favourite interviews — because Ben is incredibly candid and gives lots of useful advice. I hope you enjoy. Find Ben LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mahibenmaruthappu/ Cera Care: https://ceracare.co.uk You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

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 makes a good leader and how to make good decisions. Find Prof David Lomas UCL: https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=DALOM96 You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io