The Healthtech Podcast

Julia Warszewski is co-founder and CEO of Vayla Health, an AI-enabled clinical service for frail older adults and their families. She came to it sideways: anthropology at university, four years in operations at Deliveroo through its unicorn years, then a post-COVID migraine syndrome that put her in a dark room for months and changed how she thought about illness, isolation and who gets seen quickly.She and James work through why frailty is so badly served by a system built around episodes. Ordinary life is clinical context for a frail person, and almost none of it reaches a clinician. Julia's example is a real one: someone with dementia who has bought forty lasagnas, because every trip to the supermarket is the first one.The most useful stretch for early stage founders is on the budget boundary. Everyone in the system acknowledges the problem, everyone wants to hear the solution, and everyone wants someone else to pay for it. She walks through why hospital discharge looked ideal and did not work, why GPs asked her not to send them more alerts, and how the team landed on family caregivers reached through home care providers instead.There is also a clear explanation of how to build a medical device with an LLM in the stack without letting the LLM make the clinical decision.This is a conversation about building a company and is not medical advice.Julia Warszewski on LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/julia-warszewskiVayla Health: https://vaylahealth.ai/

Dr Prarthana Venkatesh, a London-trained surgeon, former McKinsey consultant, and Longevita founder, examines what longevity science can truly support. They explore unproven peptides, IV drips, full-body scans, early-onset cancer, and the regulation gap in supplements. She also explains why lower NAD precursor doses, rigorous ingredient testing, and ethical pricing matter.

Dr Sarah Hughes is chief executive of Mind. Aahuti Rai chairs Mind's Mental Health in the Age of AI Commission and runs the Mental Health Innovation Network. The commission exists partly because of something that happened to Sarah.She had been using ChatGPT for around two years, had given it a name, and found it genuinely useful. Then she upgraded her subscription and it behaved as though it did not know her. Her own reaction, irritation and then a real sense of abandonment, is what made her think this needed looking at properly. Two other things landed around the same time: reports from around the world of people building relationships with chatbots at the cost of everyone else in their lives, and parents contacting Mind about advice their child had been given at three in the morning.Aahuti sets out how the inquiry is actually built, around three questions on help seeking behaviour, on keeping people safe, and on whether AI widens the inequalities that already exist in mental health support. There is an open call for evidence for adults in England and Wales, plus separate work streams for technology providers, regulators and mental health providers.The most uncomfortable stretch is not about AI at all. Sarah's argument is that people return to a chatbot because it offers continuity, patience and attention that services often do not, and that facing that is harder than regulating anything.Dr Sarah Hughes on LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/sarahhughesceoAahuti Rai on LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/aahutiraiMind: https://www.mind.org.ukAI and mental health, Mind's information page: https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/tips-for-everyday-living/ai-and-mental-health/

Michael LaPorta is President of Playbook for Health, the US agency that sits on the healthcare side of the table when hospital groups, insurers and health tech companies partner with sports teams. He and James have known each other since a hostel in Guatemala fifteen years ago, and this conversation picks up from where they met again at HLTH Europe in Amsterdam.Mike explains what these partnerships actually look like once you get past the logo on the shirt. Playbook set up prostate cancer screening booths at Major League Baseball games, where men turned up beer in hand and a handful walked away with an elevated PSA and a follow-up appointment. He talks through the USD 35 million raised for paediatric cancer research with Hackensack University Medical Center, the New York Giants and Eli Manning. He describes American sports teams turning into property companies, and the medical campus Dignity Health is planning on the 260 acres the Arizona Cardinals took over in North Phoenix.James pushes on what any of this means for the UK, where hospital brands have had little reason to market to patients because patients have had little choice. Mike's read is that Britain is roughly where the US was fourteen years ago, and that the purest version of these partnerships, community screening rather than signage, is the one that travels. His closing advice is to stop assuming a sports partnership only leads back to sports medicine.Michael LaPorta on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-laporta-1967438/Playbook for Health: https://www.playbookforhealth.com/

Tom Keith-Welsh, Endava’s Client Partner for Healthcare and Life Sciences, has worked across pharma, agencies, the NHS and digital health. He shares wild stories involving cuddly toys, a hacked Nintendo Wii and a paper archive in a salt mine. They explore pharma’s short innovation cycles, why promising teams get cut, and how an 80p cost gap derailed a connected inhaler.

Steve Burnell, managing director of Tenmile and former Roche digital health leader, shares a fascinating career spanning marine ecology, filmmaking, pharma, and investing. He explores Tenmile’s $250M strategy, why it backed antimicrobial resistance, AI’s unglamorous hospital opportunities, digital pathology’s slow adoption, founder evaluation, missed investments, and Australia’s R&D advantages.

Ross Drynan, a healthcare go-to-market specialist and founder of We Don’t Consult, explores why clinical founders struggle to gain traction. They discuss validating ideas before building, breaking through early SaaS market share, and selling through diagnosis rather than demos. Ross also unpacks AI adoption, codifying expertise, proving customer value, and redeploying people instead of replacing them.

Nader Alaghband, a healthtech entrepreneur and co-founder of Ampersand Health, challenges healthcare to measure what matters to patients with Crohn’s and colitis. He explores the shift from clinical decision support to real-world evidence, why messy longitudinal data can transform care and reimbursement, the pitfalls of short-term NHS policy, and how founders protect life beyond the startup.

Dr Nikita Kanani, Global Medical Director at Neko Health, practising NHS GP and former NHS England primary care leader, recalls steering vaccination through COVID-19. She explores Neko’s latest prevention data from 80,000 scans, the future of NHS collaboration, actionable health data, longitudinal care, equity, and scaling innovation without losing trust.

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.