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 pathology and clinical decision support businesses for Roche.He and Dr James Somauroo spend a long stretch on antimicrobial resistance, which Steve calls contrarian, and for good reason. Antibiotics have been the place capital goes to die, and big pharma has largely walked away. He explains why Tenmile went in anyway, across a vaccine company, a gram negative antibiotic and a point of care test that tells a GP whether an infection is bacterial or viral.The most useful part for founders is on money. Steve is candid that he became a digital health sceptic after being the digital health guy in 1998, and he names a miss, Heidi Health, an Australian company Tenmile passed on. His line on it is "who looks like the idiot now".There is also his advice on leadership, which starts from never having felt unworthy, why he thinks the best uses of AI in hospitals are the unglamorous ones, the regulatory absurdity of proving an algorithm against two pathologists who cannot agree with each other, and what Australia's R and D tax incentive is worth to a company on the register.Steve Burnell on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveburnellTenmile: https://www.tenmile.comApply to be a guest: https://thehealthtechpodcast.comProduced by SomX

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 market share, and established teams trying to work out AI adoption.The conversation opens on why so many clinical founders fail, and it is not the product. Ross argues most spend years and their own money building something nobody has seen, then find they have never practised explaining it. He makes the case for validating cheaply first, including a defence of vibe coding as a founder's tool rather than an engineering embarrassment.From there it gets less comfortable. Healthcare buyers, unlike buyers in most B2B markets, are not thinking about your problems at all, and Ross has the best piece of feedback he has ever received to prove it. He walks through what he calls the narrow bridge: foundations, codifying your expertise, giving your ideas away for free, selling with a diagnostic rather than a demo, proving value so customers attribute the outcome to you, and leverage.There is also a hopeful stretch near the end about redeploying people rather than replacing them.Ross Drynan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ross-drynan/We Don't Consult: https://wedontconsult.co.uk

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 their week by an inflammation marker. They measure it by whether they held down a job and kept up with their kids.Nader and Dr James Somauroo get into what that means in practice. Nader explains why Ampersand moved from clinical decision support into real world evidence, and why pharmaceutical companies and payers benefit from watching the movie rather than looking at a few stills. He is blunt about UK health policy, pointing out that countries doing this well are not running their health systems on seven different people's vision in ten years. He is equally blunt about the innovator's problem of not knowing which of five competing NHS frameworks will turn out to be the one that matters. James brings his own view from intensive care and from working in policy at NHS England and Health Education England.They close on how you survive eight years of this, which for Nader means a hard separation between work and everything else.Nader Alaghband on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nader0102/Ampersand Health: https://ampersandhealth.co.ukProduced by SomX: https://somx.health

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 her pyjamas, her daughter building a diorama of the Roman empire beside a call with the Prime Minister, and her mother running the family pharmacy without PPE while her father shielded. She was asked to join the vaccine programme the week before Diwali, argued for delivering it through primary care rather than around forty hospitals, and ended up with thousands of sites and a map on the wall.The second half is Neko's year three data, which James had read on the train in and came armed to argue about. More than eighty thousand scans in 2025. Life threatening findings holding steady at about one percent across three years, which is her answer to the charge that scanning more people only finds more noise. Five or six dermatology referrals to find a melanoma, against fifteen or twenty in general practice. People with a chronic condition improving two and a half times more than people without one.There is also an honest stretch on why she thinks worried well is the wrong argument, and where an NHS partnership might go next.Dr Nikita Kanani on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drnikkikanani/Neko Health: https://www.nekohealth.comApply to be a guest: https://thehealthtechpodcast.comProduced by SomX: https://somx.health

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 people to answer it, and the answer turned out to be more nuanced than the title suggests.She and James get into what happens when health information travels through people rather than institutions. Where companies get into trouble, which she puts at the point the hype outflanks the evidence. Why the Advertising Standards Authority is playing regulatory whack-a-mole, and how a prescription only migraine drug ended up advertised in her feed by a Kardashian, in a country where that advertising is banned. Why she would ban the words anti-vaxxer and anti-masker before she banned anything else. And what she thinks would actually help, from a register of influencers working with companies to better health literacy and real transparency about where our information comes from.James puts himself in the frame too, on the Instagram ad promising employers a better bottom line if their staff take GLP-1s, and on the work SomX turns down.Deborah's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deborah-cohen-journalistDeborah's Book: https://oneworld-publications.com/work/bad-influence/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.