The Healthtech Podcast

Martin Ratz co-founded Doccla after a heart attack at forty-four that he had no reason to have. Lying in a hospital bed in Stockholm, he noticed something obvious. Inside the building you are monitored constantly, and the minute you leave, nobody is watching at all.

He and Dr James Somauroo trace what Doccla became from there. A research study at Northampton General that COVID shut down, then a virtual COVID ward stood up in a fortnight, then integrated care boards across England, plus Ireland, Germany and Austria. Martin is precise about who these patients are: multimorbid, mostly older, several long-term conditions each, and nothing like the customer of a consumer wearable. He is equally precise about what is actually blocking this, which is not the technology. It is commissioning. Doccla can take activity out of a hospital, but somebody still has to take the cost out, and the trust losing the income has no reason to help.

There is also a good exchange on the something-is-better-than-nothing argument, where James revisits a position he now thinks was wrong about AI and mental health, and Martin's answer to the safety objection, which is that the alternative to a virtual ward is usually not a hospital bed.

Doccla: https://www.doccla.com
Apply to be a guest: www.thehealthtechpodcast.com
Subscribe to Healthtech Pigeon: www.healthtechpigeon.com
Get in touch with James: www.jamessomauroo.com

This week, James is joined by Dr Kapil Savania, Medical Lead at Voy (formerly Manual) and a practising NHS GP, for a candid look at the fast-blurring line between healthcare and wellness. They dig into who should own preventative medicine, what TRT actually is — and where it gets abused — and why "fat loss," not weight loss, has to be the goal in the GLP-1 era. It's an honest conversation about holding both hats: the NHS clinician and the industry medical lead.

Connect with Kapil: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ksavania/
Learn more about Voy: https://www.joinvoy.com/
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.

This week, James is joined by Yasir Sacranie, pharmacist, content creator and founder of MicroPharm, the education platform helping thousands of trainee pharmacists pass their registration exam. Yasir talks candidly about bootstrapping a healthcare education business alongside a demanding NHS role, the family moment that finally pushed him to leave the NHS for good, and why he's deliberately keeping AI at arm's length in his business. They also get into why he still works one day a week as a barista — and what that teaches him about craft.

Connect with Yasir: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yasir-sacranie/
Learn more about MicroPharm: https://www.micropharm.uk/

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.

In this episode of The Healthtech Podcast, James is joined by Professor Reza Razavi, Professor of Paediatric Cardiovascular Science at King's College London and CEO of Fraiya, an AI ultrasound software company. Reza shares the deeply personal story behind Fraiya — including his own daughter's near-fatal undiagnosed heart condition as a newborn — and explains how AI applied to the routine 20-week anomaly scan could close the gap between the 50% of congenital heart defects currently missed and a detection rate approaching 97-98%. They get into what it actually takes to build AI that clinicians trust, why the NHS financial environment makes or breaks adoption, and how a team of 14 people is on the verge of launching across six European countries.

Connect with Reza: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reza-razavi-a50967265/
Learn more about Fraiya: https://www.fraiya.com/

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.

In this episode of The Healthtech Podcast, James is joined by Steve Bulera, Chief Scientific Officer for Safety Assessment and Toxicology at Charles River Laboratories — one of the world's largest CROs, and a company that almost every new drug passes through on its way from lab to human trials. They dig into one of the most significant shifts in preclinical drug development: the move away from traditional animal testing towards virtual control groups, AI-assisted decision-making, and what Steve calls "new approach methodologies." It's a candid conversation about where the science is, why the regulators are cautious, and what it actually takes to change a decades-old industry from within.

Connect with Steve: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-bulera-245234a9/
Learn more about Charles River Laboratories: https://www.criver.com

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.