Hassan Chaudhury - Global Digital Health Technologies

[Music] You're listening to the Royal Society of Medicine's Digital Health PUCAR series, where we aim to support healthcare innovation by disseminating knowledge of expert leaders at the Royal Society of Medicine. I'm your host, Dr. Marlon Malkin. [Music] Welcome to this episode of the Digital Health PUCAR series from the Royal Society of Medicine's Digital Health Council. All views expressed are of the speakers themselves and not of the RSM. Back at the recent developments in AI and Digital Health 2020 event, we spoke at the RSM with Hassan Childry, who was a Digital Health Lead for Healthcare UK, with the Department for International Trade. Hassan has since been at the heart of the COVID-19 PUC for Digital Health Office to support the UK's national response for the pandemic. The Collaboration Select Chat Room has been set up called Tech4CV19, which is working with the Department of International Trade, TechKK and NHSX. We're speaking this PUCAR, about how different cultures and nations utilise digital healthcare, and how the UK is developing incredible digital health technologies that will really revolutionise the way that we treat patients. It's an overview of how we must all now come together globally, to tackle some of the biggest challenges we face in this pandemic. Enjoy. So what does that mean for your day to day? Are you meeting and greeting and seeing how digital health is playing out across the world, or are you really looking at what's happening here, and trying to make sense of how digital health is really growing in the UK? So I have to do both. I'm the point of contact for 109 British embassies and high commissions around the world for when companies want to invest in the UK in digital health. And I'm also the person that manages the best of our UK supply chain. So it could be a company like, you know, the well-known ones like Babylon and Medropad, but also smaller ones that you may not have heard of like C2AI and patient source. And when I find companies that are doing really well, they have got great evidence behind them. When I think they've done a great job for the NHS, I will then speak to governments, ministries of health, insurers, telcos, pharma. When I'm speaking on behalf of the British government abroad and saying, that's what you need. Well, that's a big role to have as a powerful voice as well, because really, you can make or break the companies by how we globalise them really with digital health care. I mean, are you seeing that other countries are quick to adoption, maybe quicker than the UK, or how is it really on a broader scale, really? No one's perfect, of course, but I don't think anyone's doing very well. To give you an idea, China has never had strong primary care, the way that we think of GPs, that's not there. And while they're fantastic using mobile phones and what you might call M-Health, they don't have the cultural ideas that we do. So if you don't go to a major hospital and meet someone in a coat with a stethoscope and get a script, then it's common to feel you haven't been treated. So how can you help people in China knock you for hours? Let's look at South Africa. South Africa has the problem of apartheid and its legacy. So it doesn't have a 1% the way that many other countries do it, it has a 10% that will reach. And the problem there is in largely black areas, health care is very, very poor. And if you have to queue, you have to wake up at 4 in the morning in order to just get your family ready to queue in the hope that you can be seen by a doctor. And you're in an A&E where people are bleeding out, because there's still a lot of violence in the townships. That's the kind of problem that I can see. For example, Q8 has more migrant workers than people who indigenous. How does it build hospitals for them and manage them and know where their records are? Saudi Arabia, when it came to cyber, everyone had to do a self-assessment against five key points. So the highest you could get was 5 out of 5. And Britain, working really hard, thought, look, we think justifiably we can call ourselves 3 out of 5. And the Saudi said 5. Wow. Because they didn't want to admit any problems. Culturally that's not something they can do. So they just wrote 5. And you'd expect them to have arm guards at every entry point. They had just doors left open. And the way that people do things around the world is very different. So what it's taught me is that nobody's doing it very well. There's lots of opportunities for Britain when it does do things well to transform it. But it has to be done in the right way. It can't be done with a we're better than you. We're going to tell you how to live. It's got to be in the spirit of partnership and friendship. And I think that's how I like to come across when I go abroad. Does everyone want digital health improvements? Does everyone want that type of technology? They sometimes want it more than they need it. Which is a very strange thing to say. Everyone needs it because we don't have the workforce to be able to cope with a number of people who need care. And we can't manage without augmenting them. Definitely it's needed. But sometimes people say I really want that nice shiny AI. And you ask them why and they don't know. So I remember Poland, my very first trade mission, we were asked for electronic prescribing. We said, yes, sure we can help you with electronic prescribing. What's your pathway like? Do you have what's before it? What's after it? We just want electronic prescribing. And they just kept saying it because they didn't know where it fit. They were just told, go get it. Go get some electronic prescribing and bring it back to us. And so therefore they didn't have the strategy. So there's a want there more than the need. They didn't know their need. They just were told to get it. And if you're in Abu Dhabi and Dubai and you say you've got some really shiny AI, or you've got some that's not AI, but it's really good and it saves patients lives, saves money and is quick to implement. They'll look at the AI. They'll look at it because that's what they want. So I do have to sometimes reign in expectations and say, maybe we should start from the beginning. Have you separated your tech stack? You know, is your data and digital application layer all that separate? Forget all that. Just give me a company. So have you noticed, I mean, this is the big question, but have you noticed that there are any specific challenges that are being addressed in other countries of their healthcare? That really we aren't even looking at here, but we should. I think Brazil, with its community workers, model and very interesting, whenever people try to think carefully about engineering a solution that works and stays, that has buy in across the whole pathway, that to me is real healthcare. It's something that joins up all the dots, that prevents us from having clinician burnout, that doesn't mean that we're stuck doing lots of paperwork for no reason. Those are the kind of answers you are starting to find. I do think it can be easy to overlook what country is like Thailand are doing, but hymns have their M-RAM, their electronic medical record maturity model, and level 7 is the highest. I know that Greyhormons Street are, if not level 7, very close, Cambridge got a 6. But there was some tiny hospital in the middle of nowhere in Thailand that got a 7. And when an answer was going to be made to all of these people in this little hospital in the middle of nowhere, you got a level 7. As they made it, they all didn't just celebrate. They took off what they were wearing to show we got level 7 t-shirts. They knew they were going to get it. So sometimes you find what looks very difficult in the UK, others are just getting their head down and get it on with it. So really, to kind of sum up your opinion on all of these things, there are really different ways that different countries are tackling it, but we could really be at the forefront of it from the UK. So my final question for you today is, what challenges do you think that we can solve here in the UK that will make a huge impact globally for healthcare needs? I'm going to give one. There's many. But the first and most important when everyone's talking about AI is to get AI right. Because I don't want to see the hype overtake patient safety. I don't want to see valuation being the big thing. I want to see validation. Now, I don't know what you think, or maybe I do. But I do believe that in this country we've got the scientific rigor. We've got the size of a test bed, single pair test bed that no one can compete with, the NHS. We've got collaboration between medical schools, universities and university hospitals. That means that we can make a major contribution. I don't think you can put the kind of firepower behind it that the Chinese are doing. And the Americans doing. They've got size, they've got scale. But there's something amazing about what we have here. And it's overlapping. It's a number of different capabilities that come together in the UK. And that's why everyone looks at the UK as a special case. That's what I think we should do. Well, thank you so much for joining us today on this conversation. And look forward to many more conversations in the future. Thank you so much, Marla. Thank you for listening to this episode of the RSM Digital Health Podcast Series from the Digital Health Council. Please remember that the views expressed in this podcast are of the speakers themselves and not of the RSM. You can continue to follow us on this podcast and tune into the next episode. And also we'd love to have you down at some of the Digital Health Council events at the RSM, which you can find out more about at www.rsm.ac.uk. And we've put the links in the podcast description too. Bye for now.