Big Picture Medicine

Dr Rebecca Pope is the UK Digital & Data Science Innovation Lead at Roche, Senior Research Fellow in AI applied to real healthcare problems at UCL and a Clinical Neuroscientist. She was previously UK Director of Data Science & AI for KPMG and has been voted the Most Influential Woman in UK Tech. Her writing also regularly appears in the Guardian and the Times . We speak about what she learned from moving from research to industry, how AI can actually make Medicine more personal and I ask her why she believes in promoting diversity in STEM and why it isn’t just a case of ‘best person for the job’. I hope you enjoy. You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

Dr Michael Moor is a medical doctor doing his PhD in the Machine Learning and Computational Biology Lab at ETH Zurich. Some of his most interesting research looks at predicting sepsis using machine learning approaches. In case you’re unfamiliar, sepsis is a life threatening condition in which the body’s natural defences against an infection go into overdrive. Mortality from septic shock can be up to 50% and every minute counts. In fact, for every hour treatment is delayed — mortality increases by 7.6%. We started off by talking about a paper published in JAMA earlier this year. It assessed a popular sepsis prediction tool and found that it wasn’t very good. It was delivering so many false positives, that doctors would need to assess up to 109 patients flagged by the tool just to find one patient who was actually septic… Michael's Preprint: Predicting Sepsis in Multi-site, Multi-national Intensive Care Cohorts Using Deep Learning Michael Moor*, Nicolas Bennet∗, Drago Plecko∗, Max Horn∗,Bastian Rieck, Nicolai Meinshausen, Peter Bühlmann and Karsten Borgwardt. JAMA 2021 Paper: External Validation of a Widely Implemented Proprietary Sepsis Prediction Model in Hospitalized Patients Andrew Wong, Erkin Otles, Meng; John P. Donnelly, Andrew Krumm, Jeffrey Mccullough, Olivia Detroyer-cooley, Justin Pestrue, Mecon Marie Phillips, Judy Konye, Carleen Penoza, Muhammad Ghous, Karandeep Singh You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

Dr Patrick Carroll is the Chief Medical Officer of Hims & Hers — a US Telehealth company which he helped go public in a $1.6 billion dollar SPAC deal. Hims & Hers focuses on many taboo health issues such as sexual health issues, hair loss and mental health. Dr Carroll graduated from Dartmouth Medical School and was previously CMO of Walgreens. We talk about how he got to where he is, what advice he gives to young physician-leaders, why working in primary care was critical for his career and some of the lessons he’s learnt along the way. I hope you enjoy. You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

Dr Christopher Kelly is a Senior Research Scientist at Google and a Neonatal Intensive Care Doctor in London. He founded CK Net whilst at Medical School at Cambridge — which was generating £60M in sales for its clients the year before it was acquired as well as founding GettingMarried.co.uk — which was acquired by Prezola in 2016. He is also an Angel Investor, having invested in tech startups such as Deliveroo and Rota.com. We talk about his fascinating winding story — particularly how he was willing to drop it all in pursuit of his passion, we talk about how he was able to build and scale his companies whilst at Medical School and how being a little bit obsessive has paid dividends throughout his career. I hope you enjoy. You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

What does it take to leave Syria during the Civil War and become the first Syrian Rhodes Scholar? Dr Alexey Youssef trained in Medicine in Syria — where he practiced during the Civil War, during which the hospital he worked in was bombed. He then became the first Syrian to gain the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University and then started his PhD in Clinical AI. He has now started his MBA at the Harvard Business School. We talk about some of his research which focuses on building Electronic Health Records in low and middle income countries such as Syria — which has garnered support from the WHO. We also talk about what it was about him and what approaches he used to achieve such amazing success when living and working during the Syrian Civil War. I hope you enjoy. Alex's Podcast: https://potbppodcast.com You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

How can we design AI systems which remove human bias — rather than perpetuate it? Ziad Obermeyer is Associate Professor and Blue Cross of California Distinguished Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Berkeley School of Public Health where he researchers and teaches on the intersection of machine learning and healthcare. Some of his most interesting research focuses on algorithmic bias, and how we can better build AI systems which avoid perpetuating and falling into these traps. We talk about his fascinating story, how he created an AI algorithm which actually reduced bias and superseded human performance and some of the things he’s learnt along the way. I hope you enjoy. Prof Obermeyer's new initiative: Nightingale Open Source. You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

What does it take to become a great clinical academic? Neil Sebire is a Professor of Pathology at the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) which is the country’s leading children’s research hospital as well as the Chief Clinical Data Officer at Health Data Research UK He has loads and loads of other accolades including over 700 published papers, a H index of 88 and 32,000 citations so it’s always a privilege to get his thoughts. This is the third podcast interview I’ve done with him. In Episode 2 of this podcast we talked about his story and informatics, then in Episode 17 we talked about how to be more effective at what you do as a Clinical Academic. This is a continuation of that last episode — in which I ask more about how to become a great Clinical Academic, how to make better decisions, how to play the long game, what’s worth pursuing and what’s best to ignore and lots more. I hope you enjoy. You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

Yusuf Sherwani is the Co-founder and CEO of QuitGenius — a digital clinic for addiction. QuitGenius started life as a smoking cessation app, which Yusuf and his Co-founders created whilst at Imperial College Medical School. They have since expanded to the US and have raised just under $80M dollars. We talk about the overnight success, and how it wasn’t really overnight. We talk a lot about decision making and useful mental models as a healthtech founder, and some of Yusuf’s failures and how he dealt with them. You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

Dr Ann Taylor studied at Harvard Medical School, practiced as an Endocrinologist at Mass General Hospital before shifting over to Pharma — now sitting as AstraZeneca’s Chief Medical Officer. This episode's full of wisdom, we talk about being a generalist vs a specialist at life, what she learned from leaving Medicine and entering Pharma and her tips for medics who want to do great things outside of the clinic. I hope you enjoy.

Colin Espie is Professor of Sleep Medicine at Oxford University as well as Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer of Big Health. With insomnia, there are two mainstays of treatment. The first is medication or drugs, and the second is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (or CBT). CBT has traditionally required face-to-face treatment from a psychologist, and can be difficult to access for patients in a constrained health service. Far easier, the criticism goes, to just give someone a pill. Fundamentally, the problem is that prescription drugs are very scalable and relatively cheap. Face-to-face CBT on the other hand, is expensive and doesn’t scale well. But new approaches package CBT into a digital platform or app — making it infinitely more scalable — and opening it up to many more patients. Big Health are creators of a digital CBT program called Sleepio. Sleepio boasts the largest evidence base in digital mental health with 13 randomised controlled trials. Its parent company: Big Health has raised over $50M in funding. We talk about digital therapy for sleep, as well as some debate about whether digital therapeutics require the same evidence as traditional medications. You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io