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-warszewski

Vayla Health: https://vaylahealth.ai/

A lot of the longevity industry is selling certainty it does not have. Dr Prarthana Venkatesh, founder and CEO of Longevita and a London-trained surgeon who went from core surgical training to McKinsey before starting the company, joins James to separate what the evidence actually supports from what is just demand.

They work through the peptide market, where consumer appetite has run ahead of human trial data entirely, and the drip clinics and full body scans now being sold to people with no way of judging them. Prarthana explains why she spent two years bringing every dose in her 12-ingredient formulation down rather than up, and why overdoing the NAD precursors sold as NAD supplements is the quiet problem nobody in the category wants to discuss. There is a candid stretch on price: she puts the cost of making most supplements below GBP 20 a box, and asks why a blood test that costs GBP 20 to run reaches consumers at hundreds.

James makes the case for looking at supplementation from first principles, once you strip away the word supplement. Prarthana talks about growing up in Myanmar, setting up rural health camps at 17, and what she saw at Chelsea and Westminster during COVID that pushed her out of surgery and into prevention.

This is a conversation between two doctors and is not medical advice.

Prarthana on LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/dr-prarthana-v

Longevita: https://www.longevita-uk.com

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/sarahhughesceo

Aahuti Rai on LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/aahutirai

Mind: https://www.mind.org.uk

AI 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 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

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-journalist

Deborah's Book: https://oneworld-publications.com/work/bad-influence/

Apply to be a guest: ⁠www.thehealthtechpodcast.com⁠

Subscribe to Healthtech Pigeon 🐦: ⁠www.healthtechpigeon.com⁠

Get in touch with James: ⁠www.jamessomauroo.com⁠

This podcast was brought to you by ⁠SomX⁠.