#443: The NHS has trust. AI doesn't. Now what?

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 meaningful public engagement is the missing piece in the UK's fragmented AI strategy.Connect with Ahmed: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahmed-binesmael-025b07225Learn more about The Health Foundation: https://www.health.org.ukApply to be a guest: www.thehealthtechpodcast.comSubscribe to Healthtech Pigeon 🐦: www.healthtechpigeon.comGet in touch with James: www.jamessomauroo.comThis podcast was brought to you by SomX.

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 see, and why he's committed to making it available to every woman on earth regardless of ability to pay.Connect with Robert: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertbunn/Learn more about Ultrasound AI: https://www.ultrasound.aiApply to be a guest: www.thehealthtechpodcast.comSubscribe to Healthtech Pigeon : www.healthtechpigeon.comGet in touch with James: www.jamessomauroo.comThis podcast was brought to you by SomX.

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 genuinely solving problems or just adding to middle-class anxiety.Connect with Yath: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yathprem/Learn more about Flo Health: https://flo.health/Apply to be a guest: www.thehealthtechpodcast.comSubscribe to Healthtech Pigeon : www.healthtechpigeon.comGet in touch with James: www.jamessomauroo.comThis podcast was brought to you by SomX.

This week, James is joined by Dr David Neal, Assistant Professor at Amsterdam UMC and co-lead of the eHealth Living & Learning Lab (ELLLA), for a wide-ranging chat about what happens when technology disrupts a healing ritual that hasn't fundamentally changed since the 16th century. They explore why medicine is roughly 150 years behind in understanding the role of humans in healthcare, what that means for AI-driven care, and why the most effective healthtech products still fail if nobody thinks about adoption from day one...Connect with David: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-david-neal/Learn more about ELLLA: https://ellla.amsterdamumc.nl/Apply to be a guest: www.thehealthtechpodcast.comSubscribe to Healthtech Pigeon 🐦: www.healthtechpigeon.comGet in touch with James: www.jamessomauroo.comThis podcast was brought to you by SomX.

James welcomes Declan Hadley, the healthcare lead at Cisco, who shares his extensive experience in the NHS and health informatics. The conversation explores the evolution of healthcare technology, the importance of digitisation, and the role of AI in improving patient outcomes. Declan emphasizes the need for collaboration between startups and healthcare organizations, the significance of local ownership of AI, and the challenges of ensuring safety in rapidly changing technologies. He also reflects on his personal journey and the lessons learned from raising a successful son in the world of Fantasy Premier League (seriously).Apply to be a guest: www.thehealthtechpodcast.comSubscribe to Healthtech Pigeon 🐦: www.healthtechpigeon.comGet in touch with James: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-somauroo/This podcast was brought to you by SomX.

This week, James is joined by Ian Wharton, the co-founder and CEO of Aide Health, a design-led chronic disease management platform with retention rates 20x the sector average. In this episode, Ian makes the case that design - not technology - is the missing ingredient in digital health, explaining why only 3–4% of patients stick with health apps after 30 days and what Aide does differently to hit 70% retention at three months. We get into the role of conversational AI in behaviour change, why medication adherence remains one of healthcare's billion-pound unsolved problems, and how Aide's new patient-facing scribe Mirror was born from Ian's personal experience of his father's Alzheimer's diagnosis. We also discuss Aide's white paper on building trust in AI, why pursuing Class II regulation as a startup of six people is a statement of intent, and what the Meta glasses saga tells us about the trap of adopting technology just because it's within reach.Connect with Ian: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianjwharton/Learn more about Aide Health: https://aide.health/Apply to be a guest: www.thehealthtechpodcast.comSubscribe to Healthtech Pigeon 🐦: www.healthtechpigeon.comGet in touch with James: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-somauroo/This podcast was brought to you by SomX.

This week, James is joined by Dr. Elsa Zekeng, founder of SökerData who shares the story behind building a company tackling one of healthcare’s most persistent blind spots: biased and underrepresented clinical trial data. She discusses her journey from infectious disease research and frontline outbreak response during Ebola, to advising on COVID-19 vaccine uptake, and ultimately founding SökerData to aggregate more inclusive health datasets.Connect with Elsa: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-elsa-zekeng-sokerdata/Learn more about SökerData: https://www.soker-data.com/Apply to be a guest: www.thehealthtechpodcast.comSubscribe to Healthtech Pigeon 🐦: www.healthtechpigeon.comGet in touch with James: www.jamessomauroo.comThis podcast was brought to you by SomX.

In this episode of The Healthtech Podcast, Dr James Somauroo speaks with T.N. Giridhar, Managing Director and CEO of SSG Capital, an investment banker and venture capital investor with nearly 30 years of experience spanning public markets, Goldman Sachs-level M&A and early-stage VC. Giridhar draws on a career managing over $17 billion in transactions to argue that the quality of an investment outcome is determined almost entirely by the quality of the people behind the company, not the metrics, the market size or the business plan. The conversation covers the real reason most companies fail at the VC stage, the one question every founder should ask an investor before accepting their money, and why the NHS is repeating, at scale, the talent retention mistakes that investment banks identified and addressed decades ago.Learn more about T.N. Giridhar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/t-n-giridhar-9352602/Learn more about ssg capital: https://www.ssgcapital.uk/Learn more about SomX for your healthtech company:https://somx.health/Apply to be a guest on The Healthtech Podcast:https://www.thehealthtechpodcast.com/Subscribe to our newsletter, Healthtech Pigeon 🐦:https://www.healthtechpigeon.com/

This week, James is joined by Dr Saira Ghafur, respiratory consultant, health tech leader, and Co-Founder of Prova Health. She shares her journey from medical training in Scotland to NHS consultancy, policy fellowships at NHS England and in New York, and co-founding two health tech ventures. Saira discusses the realities of scaling digital health, generating credible evidence for innovation, and the challenges of regulating AI in healthcare.Connect with Saira: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-saira-g-943a1b1b/Learn more about Prova Health: https://www.provahealth.com/ Learn more about SomX for your healthtech company:https://somx.health/Apply to be a guest on The Healthtech Podcast: https://www.thehealthtechpodcast.com/Subscribe to our newsletter, Healthtech Pigeon 🐦:https://www.healthtechpigeon.com/

In this episode of The Healthtech Podcast, we’re joined by Kang Hsu, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Canary Speech, to explore the emerging field of vocal biomarkers and what they could mean for earlier disease detection.Speech is more than language. It is airflow, vocal cord vibration, neuromuscular control and cognitive processing in motion. Subtle acoustic features such as pitch variation, jitter, shimmer and timing patterns can reflect underlying physiological and neurological change.Can those signals help detect depression, anxiety, mild cognitive impairment or even early neurodegenerative disease?Kang brings a rare perspective. As a practising physician and former Chief Medical Informatics Officer within a major US health system, he led large-scale EHR implementations and AI deployments across a 50+ hospital network. He understands both the science and the realities of adoption at system level.This conversation covers:• What vocal biomarkers are and how they are measured• How 40 seconds of natural speech can generate thousands of acoustic data points• Clinical applications across behavioural health and neurology• Sensitivity, specificity and the limits of current evidence• What makes clinicians trust and adopt new AI tools• Why seamless workflow integration is critical for scaleLearn more about SomX for your healthtech company:https://somx.health/Apply to be a guest on The Healthtech Podcast:https://www.thehealthtechpodcast.com/Subscribe to our newsletter, Healthtech Pigeon 🐦:https://www.healthtechpigeon.com/