15 Minutes With The Doctor: Learn from Healthcare Entrepreneurs and Innovators Dr Vinay Shankar

On this episode, we have CEO Bruce Elliot from Memory Lane games. It all started as a chat in a humble pub with his co-founder, where they began to discuss their own mothers and how much joy they gained from reminiscing over old photos. Recognising the value of conversation for those with dementia and cognitive decline, they have utilised a gamification model with photos and images in an app.



Learn about the journey to over 50k downloads and users in 100 countries, how they can utilise digital biomarkers in neurological conditions, how working with the Mayo clinic in the USA is helping to scale the platform and the story behind their popular game about the iconic London underground.







Discover:





How Bruce’s wisdom was developed during the dot.com boom

How visual, cognitive, and emotional stimuli is connected to fine motor skills

How stimulating memories on Vancouver and Sheffield, led to over 3000 games for those with dementia

How users can search for recognisable cities from across the world to use the app

How their premium service uses family photos and data

How collaborating with the Alzheimer Association helped them test and modify the app

How the games are designed to encourage conversation, not high scores

How an elderly patient was able to overcome a traumatic experience using the app

How the app can maintain or reduce the severity of symptoms in patients

How collaborations with Mayo Clinic and Arizona State University is scaling their product

How the app can track deteriorations in users with 7 clinical data points

How their game play data has the potential to serve as healthcare data for early interventions

How hyper-personalisation is what keeps the app competitive





Guest: Bruce Elliot

LinkedIn: Memory Lane Games

Website: https://memorylanegamesdirect.com/



Host: Dr Vinay Shankar

Website: https://www.oncedaily.co

Podcast: 15 Minutes With The Doctor

On this episode, CEO and co-founder Kelly Klifa joins the show to discuss Ally Health. It’s a company that uses digital scheduling with a track and trace type system to bring clinical care to the home. No stranger to entrepreneurship, she is the founder of Testing for All, a company with an annual turnover of £29 million, which became the leading Covid-19 platform for connecting laboratories and home testing. They started with just one partner, and ended with eight labs processing between 8K and 10K tests a day.



Ally Health utilises a similar tech to ensure that community nursing workflow is optimised replacing traditional systems that meet demand with less efficiently. It also brings the ability for patients to have real-time updates about their nursing visits.







Discover:







How Kelly developed her first successful venture, Testing for All through the pandemic

How her mission to make Testing for All accessible and affordable succeeded

How they built real-time integrations across the logistical journey for transparency

How the development of Testing for All and the experience of Covid-19 led to the creation of Ally Health

How the limits of remote healthcare and the importance of nursing led them to Ally Health

How Ally Health can replace an inefficient paper-based system for mobile and community nursing

How they created a platform to aggregate nurses and create an on-demand scheduling system

How their solution can help support nurses with their workload by helping to get nurses in the right places which suit their competences

How homebound patients are now able to track their nurse visits with up-to-date visibility

How for agency nurses the platform creates a ‘gig economy’ to improve their access to work

How the platform is reducing admin work in the NHS

How their current pathways include preventative medicine and preoperative care

How they’re moving towards offering a supply-based resource search for nursing







Guest: Kelly Klifa

LinkedIn: Ally Health

Website: Ally Health



Host: Dr Vinay Shankar

Website: https://www.oncedaily.co

Podcast: 15 Minutes With The Doctor

On this episode Dr Patrick Hart joins the show, he is the clinical operations lead at Concentric Health. We delve into how Concentric is pioneering change in surgical operations and procedures. It streamlines how patients and clinicians navigate the consent process, reducing errors and delays in operations, integrating with electronic health record systems, and ultimately leading to better informed patients. The company is the market leader for digital consent in the UK, offering standardised consent forms for over 2000 operations across various NHS hospitals.









Discover:





How Patrick pivoted from medical training to health technology

How he became a ‘founder associate’ at Concentric and what responsibilities and opportunities it has offered

How Concentric Health was developed by surgeons frustrated with archaic paper-based patient forms

How this digital solution prevents basic errors in information that can cause delays and cancellations

How increased medical-legal cases over the last 15 years have prompted a discussion on the field of consent in medicine

How the current organisational structure of colour coding consent forms often leaves clinicians stressed and overworked

How junior doctors and staff have praised the platform for providing standardised information at their fingertips

How a medical professional uses the platform and the customisable options they have available

How enhancing patient conversations not replacing them is the focus of digitalisation

How their internal monitoring continues to make the product more efficient for users

How their biggest competitor became the status quo, not a competing product

How Concentric are using several access touchpoints to make integration as seamless as possible





Guest: Dr Patrick Hart

Website: https://concentric.health/



Host: Dr Vinay Shankar

Website: https://www.oncedaily.co

Podcast: 15 Minutes With The Doctor

On this episode, Vinay is joined by co-founder Umaima Ahmad, to discuss their startup 52North and their ambitious tech that powers a life-saving product. Neutrocheck is device for those undergoing chemotherapy and who are at risk of neutropenic sepsis. With a background in financial law, Umaima and her team of co-founders were inspired to solve a problem that is a serious side-effect for those needing crucial treatment for cancer. Hear all about their journey to creating the product and how it all took off after a small grant of only ten thousand pounds.







Discover:





How Umaima’s mid-career Masters led to the development of 52North

How her background as a financial lawyer gave her the transferable skills to become an entrepreneur

How a Cambridge University mentorship programme offered them their first investment

How they developed a product to diagnose neutropenic sepsis, a common side effect of chemotherapy without unnecessary A&E visits

How Neutrocheck, their product and app, can save time, money, and lives in cancer care

How using COVID-19 lateral flow kits as a stimulus helped them brainstorm a solution for diagnosing Neutropenic Sepsis

How branching out into digital and AI is being tempered by targets for accessibility and health equity

How patient feedback and input from medical professionals has been essential in building the solution

How they became the first product to be fully endorsed by the MacMillan Cancer Trust in 100 years

How Neutrocheck could reduce costs to the NHS by around £70 million

How they are beginning to explore new avenues for detecting disease using their portable low-cost device





Guest: Umaima Ahmad

Website: https://52north.health/



Host: Dr Vinay Shankar

Website: https://www.oncedaily.co

Podcast: 15 Minutes With The Doctor

On this episode, Adam Robinson joins the show to share how his diverse background including working with Tesco and Spotify, led him to found Surgery Hero. The company was developed to tackle mental and physical issues that can reduce the effectiveness of surgery due to various aspects such as anxiety, weight management, alcohol use and more. They provide their patients with education, coaching and digital tools that can reduce cancellations, hospital stays, and rehabilitation times. With the evidence showing that good perioperative care can improve patient outcomes by more than 50%, their goal is to have 100 million people have successful surgeries. Adam takes us through the targets for the business, their vision for the expansion of the product, and how his own experience impacted the development of the product.







Discover::





How working with Tesco became one of the most creative times of his career

His thoughts on what companies understand about the necessity of UX/UI

His impressions on digital transformation in healthcare & the NHS

How they noticed a gap in the market for supporting surgical procedures

How they connected perioperative care and lifestyle changes with patient outcomes

How Surgery Hero is delivered as a ‘B to B to C’ model through their app

What you’d expect to find on the Surgery Hero app if you were facing a surgical procedure

How Wayne Rooney and Brad Pitt fit into their user design!

How they’re using behavioural change methods to foster lifestyle changes in the app

How they’ve built a market in the UK across 12 NHS sites





Guest: Adam Robinson

Website: https://www.surgeryhero.com/



Host: Dr Vinay Shankar

Website: https://www.oncedaily.co

Podcast: 15 Minutes With The Doctor

On this episode, Vinay Shankar is joined by Athena Doshi, founder of Celeste, a medication diagnostic tool. The company aims to tackle the gender gap in health, to provide prescriptions that fit physiology to improve outcomes in women’s health. Celeste aims not only to bridge the gap, but decrease wastage and eliminate the time it takes to treat a patient with the optimal drug. The platform works seamlessly with healthcare systems to provide a holistic approach to diagnostics and prescriptions. Learn all about it, and why Athena believes the ExactRx platform is a crucial infrastructure piece for healthcare systems.



Learn about:





How she began her first company at college as a response to a medical mission trip in Tanzania

How she is using the principle of co-design to develop Celeste as a holistic standard of care

How Celeste is addressing the gender data health gap and its disproportionate impact on women

How Celeste’s diagnostic tool called ExactRx, is addressing the experiences patients have with medication to produce better health outcomes

How the tool automates existing guidelines

How the underpinning research for Celeste is pharmacometabolomics, an area the co-founder specialises in

How Celeste can be used by clinicians to better inform their prescriptions

How Athena is focussed on pitching Celeste as an infrastructure system for healthcare systems







Guest: Athena Doshi

Website: Celeste



Host: Dr Vinay Shankar

Website: https://www.oncedaily.co

Podcast: 15 Minutes With The Doctor