#425 Is it unethical not to use AI in mental health care? (Part 2): Dr Ross Harper from Limbic

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