The Healthtech Podcast

Tom Keith-Welsh is Client Partner for Healthcare and Life Sciences at Endava, and he has worked in almost every seat in this industry: regulatory affairs at Glaxo Wellcome, pharma sales for Merck, two pharma advertising agencies, marketing at an infection control software company, project management inside two NHS trusts, and then senior digital health and innovation roles at Merck and GSK.
He takes James through the whole route, and the stories are the point. A hijacked lorry full of cuddly toys for a children's growth hormone pen. A Nintendo Wii hacked into a mode-of-action demo for a haematology congress. The salt mine two miles from a hospital where paper records were kept for thirty years, and the one question that made most of the scanning project unnecessary: which of these pages do you actually read?
Then the harder conversation. James asks whether pharma, with the deepest pockets in healthcare, does enough to make digital health business models work. Tom's answer is no, and his reasoning is worth hearing if you are building anything you hope pharma will pay for. He explains the two year innovation cycle, why those teams keep getting cut, and the connected asthma inhaler that was shut down over the gap between 80p and five pound eighty.
Tom Keith-Welsh on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomkw/
Endava: https://www.endava.com/
Apply to be a guest: ⁠https://thehealthtechpodcast.com⁠
Produced by ⁠SomX⁠

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/steveburnell
Tenmile: https://www.tenmile.com
Apply to be a guest: https://thehealthtechpodcast.com
Produced 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.uk
Produced 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.com

Apply to be a guest: https://thehealthtechpodcast.com
Produced by SomX: https://somx.health