Innovation in Surgery: Dafydd Loughran
Summary
This evening, we will feature presentations from Dr. Doctored Lokeren and Ryan Kirsten on invasions in the surgical space. Dr. Lokeren is the CEO of a healthcare start-up and a clinical entrepreneur for NHS England, while Mr. Kirsten is a consultant plastic surgeon. Both presenters will offer insights into digital health, the future of surgery, and clinical entrepreneurship. Dr. Lokeren will begin by reflecting on his journey into innovation and his involvement in tech similarly reflect on the pros and cons of working in medical innovation. Their presentations are sure to provoke thought and discussion on the future of medical technology.
Learning objectives
Learning Objectives:
- Understand the role of healthcare entrepreneurs in the NHS
- Reflect on the pros and cons of using traditional clinical training pathways vs. innovations within healthcare
- Identify the advantages of developing applications for clinical use
- Examine how mobile technology and applications can simplify patient consent process
- Analyze the implications of digital innovation in the surgical space.
Similar communities
Similar events and on demand videos
Computer generated transcript
Warning!
The following transcript was generated automatically from the content and has not been checked or corrected manually.
Good evening, everyone. It's nice to see everyone. I was going through the chat today. Ah, I think we sent out uh, the messages on social media. It's very nice to see everyone tonight. I hope you enjoy tonight's event. And I think a few of you being up in the poster hold me posted about the post A whole, which is fantastic. I can't wait to check out all of the amazing posters. So this evening, guys, we are going to start on Commence. Are IBM see surgery conference on. We are delighted for all the speakers that are going to join us in the first half of the talk. We are going to have Doctor Doctored Lokeren or Mr Doctor Doctor And he is now in its very own healthcare. Start up. Probably. But beyond that And then later on, we've got Ryan Kirsten, who's a consultant Plastic surgeon. Um and, uh, we will have both of them talking back to back after each other. Ah, straight away. So if you have any questions, please save them afterwards, so I'll give a little bit of uninterested for definite Definite. Is the Chief Executive officer at Concentric help on D is also a any chest clinical entrepreneur for the NHS England. Uh, he is a surgeon by training. He's completely course surgical training and then went on Teo, uh, work in med tech and, uh, health tech on. He stepped away from his SPR training in 2016 on he's been involved in Intron a portion within the any chest. And is that teams that ah ah ah tech unicorn. And he's now delivering the marketing and leading digital consent application, uh, within within the NHS at the moment. So it's a small connected that team. Thank you so much for joining us today. That would I will hand it over to you. Amazing. Thank you. So much for kind was. So, um, what we're gonna do between Ryan and I surround we're joining 20 minutes or so is to try and give a bit of a flavor off And what invasion could look like in in the space in the surgical space. I'm gonna share a little bit of my journey and kind of reflections of having the innovation in in a few different places in with a few different hats. And what some of those reflections are and and then we're going to step through to Ryan. And who will take up forward? He's got roses, you know, The oral conversations is technologist and these kind of things. So he has a really great feeling of. And what are the themes and that a coalescing around kind of digital health and surgery? And what does the future of surgery look like? And so, as you said, playing a lot of questions in M, you know, hopefully there's a there's an opportunity to just just reflect together as a group on on where you know on these journeys and where that's taking us. So my story. And so I was a surgical trainee in Wells. So I did my A med school in Cardiff Foundation training and called training in in Wales both and suffers and know First Onda. I'm from a kind of reasonably techie family on, so it was no surprise that in my foundation years I found myself kind of playing around with lots of different things and mainly through frustration. So, you know, little things, you know, on the wards or a it just felt frustrating, felt annoying and and so my usual kind of and approach to that was to try and see if there was some simple solutions that I could to do just basically for my own, for my own. Use it for my own sanity. And so it was a foundation, doc. I would start. And, you know, I ended up building few Web applications and little things that I would use on one of them, which kind of becomes more relevant getting down in down the journey Waas a Consent eight memoir So and it was kind of one correct moment, as as an F two. So you never got internationally. And so that's a second year post graduate and where I was told, Right, you're you know this on this foam your job is to get the consent from all the patients. So, you know, go through, go through that consent form and get that consents perceived then with the operation on my NuvaRing. Little about orthopedics, and that's seemed a bit crazy that I was having these conversations with patients. So I basically I didn't know what I was meant to be talking to patients about what those kind of risks were, what the outcomes were And so I started building something for my own use and that I could just, you know, remind myself before having those conversations about those kind of key things on basically from there. And that was a kind of first kind of teeny little step into innovation. It wasn't kind of and it wasn't kind of on purpose. It wasn't express. It wasn't gonna me trying to do innovation. It was just me trying to kind of solve this problem, that it was annoying me and on D over the next kind of year, too. When I go from the hospital, the hospital people would be saying, Oh, you know before before you go and consent a patient first and procedure, what you doing on your phone? And actually, even though that was only 2012 2013 even at that point, you know, it's not that long ago, but it was quite unusual that you had kind of Mobil's act, and people would be like, Well, should we have your phone out on things that things have definitely changed in that respect, and but from that quite organically, quite a few people would start using this application that I could've built on and would add content on to that and grew this bank of information about kind of risks of operations and not lead the kind of put a little bit of a seed off. It's kind of interesting, and the the community around kind of clinical entrepreneurship, so so kind of people who are conditions who are doing something a bit unusual or something slightly different to the to the normal clinical training pathways. And that community was so small at that time that if you're doing anything at all, kind of everyone knew, knew each other and on. Do you have lots of opportunities from that? You know, going in pitching it, start up schools and all sorts of very things, and so two years, then line in 2015 3 sixteen's. I was finishing court raining. You're going into ST three years early. Urology. Red Star. I was going curious enough to say, Well, what if I don't do that kind of normal training pathway? What does that look like on? But most people in that scenario don't know what that could look like, and and I had some pretty tough conversations with training program directors education. Supervise is the kind of consultant. So who who meant to be kind of support to me along that path on Do you know, that was very much long lines of, you know? What are you doing? Why? You know, if you think you've you've done your MRI C s. You're gonna finish in surgical examine. You know, this is the path you're on. Don't be crazy. Don't throw this away, you know, a little like kind of stuff. And so I kind of stopped having those conversations because they were that productive, And, uh but I thought, Well, there's enough of me. I'm kind of curious, never not put off by those conversations. I want to explore this a little bit. I wasn't brave enough to say, right. I'm gonna go and join the start up, and I'm gonna kind of jump in and do this, So I am did one of these kind of side steps. I did something that's available in the in the UK, which is called a leadership fellowships or a year, and it kind of still within the NHS, but slightly outside of programs. So you might sit in in a kind of innovation type roll or a quality improvement type, row and and learn about kind of leadership in that kind of stuff. So I did that for you for a year and was given huge amount of and space and freedom to explore. So I sat down on that first Wednesday morning and with my education supervisor for that year on day was kind of I'm kind of interested in what you do with a year of freedom, and that was in just a knopper to nitty to do something completely different to what had been the previous year. So I did, and lots of work within a quality improvement hub. I did, you know, lots of supporting lots of projects within the energies. And then they also have an opportunity because of the space I had and to *** and just sit and watch and get involved with startups and since that time in London and that kind of stuff, and so as we go through this kind of stepped, what I want to do is just reflect on some of the kind of opportunities, the pros and cons of doing things in different spaces. So if you think about that first step that you know, me, just solving a problem and very organically growing out of that. And there's a lot of benefit to that. Let your super super super close to the problem and Andre often just by virtue of being within the organization within the kind of system. And there are a lot of opportunities for that. So you can learn super fast because you're so close to the problem and and you've got really easy access to other people on. But other people could try your thing and they say, Oh, can we do this and that? And it's It's very easy to make sure that you're really on the right path and you quickly aware that's something you might have built or started playing around with, you know, wouldn't work or, you know, is missing this and that, because you just can't get away from that. You're so close to it. And then that next step, where working with and kind of project within the energy s of that kind of and introduce ships and not on entrepreneurship, but kind of innovating. But within an organization that's going to turn sometimes used for that and that's really interesting. So you are in some ways still close enough and and kind of within the organization. So you've got the context of why something might work while something wouldn't you? It's quite easy to know who the right people to talk to, to try and get things to happen. And but you're definitely hamstrung in terms of most of those setups. Don't have great development teams and, you know, date science and and some of the things that these projects sometimes need. And so you can often say, Well, yeah, this is exactly what we need to do. We've got good clarity of what we might want to do, but it's quite difficult to actually execute it and do that stuff. So the end of that year I am was approached by Bubble on half a reason. A controversial company and innovating in primary care initially, and some of you might have heard of Bubble on the kind of recently I P. O. D. In New York and I went to public when they were. It's the reason we young So they were 80 people and I was there for almost two years, and in that time you know, grew massively and you know that were 800 people or so and when I left almost two years later, and that was really interesting. So this is a digital health company and sat outside of the organization to trying to disrupt the status quo, really? And on d that comes with it, you know, it comes with its opportunities and its challenges. So, you know, first thing first, I learned a huge amount during that process. And just in terms of seeing, you know, an organization change and organization grow. And you know how you build a business. And I went into that role as a clinician on two years later, I was still a collision. Mr. Lamb still think of myself as a commission but had been exposed and had started learning some of the kind of nuts and bolts of you know how our business works and how you can, you know, learn things from other sectors. So in that kind of digital health space, we actually see a huge amount of people coming from other industries into those kind of cool, fast growing digital health companies. And they're so many more of them now and that's a space that's exploding. And there's just a huge demand for clinicians and to be involved in in those kind of said it. But you also learned from that. So, you know, lots of the people coming into those companies might have come from other, you know, commercial companies. That might be, you know, coming from Let's see, you're coming from, you know, shops and that considered a bring it bring it attitude, which is, you know, sometimes you have to challenge and you can say, Well, does that really work in healthcare? Is that the right approach? But there are some things that you learned say Okay, you know, actually, that's That's the way you change. You change behaviors and things that companies in commercial company in court, you know, and consumer Bratton's are really good at making us do, which often in healthcare, you know, changes really slow and really hard. And it's, you know, everyone is kind of pushing against it. But some of those and consumer brands that we all gonna let know and love and jump at and, you know, all use and day today have cracked a lot of that kind of behavioral stuff, so you can learn stuff from that. And but there are definitely challenges. And I, you know, saw it. It was quite interesting, kind of trying to do the right thing. But outside of the system, in quite a controversial company, and so you could have come up against the system and you hit the system and you spend a decent amount of time trying to kind of am, you know, patch up issues or and, you know, try not to be the bad guy and kind of finding ways to be useful without and kind of disruptive, you know, disrupting in the right amount and right way. And that's that's always a challenge and finding that balance between being a kind of business and and being a healthcare company who were trying to do, have care good things on then I. So I then had the opportunity in between 19 to go and take what had been that kind of side projects that bedroom project and around consent and make it a really thing. So we got a reasonably sized and innovative okay Grant, which is the kind of UK research and innovation grant body and funded us to go and make it real thing. And there's a kind of an interesting story and perseverance there as well. So we had and gone to innovate. You can ask for Grant from the a couple of times and not not got it. And then in 2018 we were back to them again with a with a bigger grant and with a slightly different focus and innovate said to us know and that you can't You can't do that because you've already applied twice and you didn't get the ground so we can look at it again. And so we can have really pushed in kind of a zoo, a decent of to inferring and of trying to convince them that this was, you know, in different enough that it wasn't just a reactivation and had different scope. And please do look at look at this application and And they agreed to do that and and we got that grant. And that was a you know, a huge change moment for us. You know, any male and half five on a Friday evening saying Here's the money to go and take What was this tiny little organic idea and something that very slowly grew out from in 2012 2030. Then I go make it a three thing. And so two years down the road, they done the road. We em now the widest used. Did you consent application in the UK and increasing use internationally and being used across lots of lots of an interest organizations by now and growing quite quickly. And And that's, you know, being done in a quite a different kind of approach with a very small little tightly knit group. Again, this is kind of a clinicians, developers and designers very clinically lead and on. Do you know it kind of trying? My approach in terms of concentric is to almost feel like we're inside that the organization. I kind of like that feeling of being inside then the the organization and feeling close, close enough and being to collaborate an innovator and feeling as if you're in the same team. You know, I want to be delivering a product and into a dangerous organization where that organization thinks within the team and thinks, you know, yeah, one day after, get the you know, the summer barbecue, that kind of that kind of feel rather than us kind of selling in. And I think that's a That's a much more kind of healthy approach for first and for for barking of wellbeing it from from a digital health team as well to feel that were part of that. We're not just kind of hard selling and going in. And so and that's Michael. If I'm gonna tend over to Ryan in a moment of So So what we can I can give explore with Ryan is going into you know what, some of the themes on digital health and and what the future of surgery looks like and then bring it back together for some cute A t. Think about you know, these these journeys in the different pros and cons of innovating with different hats on and his commissions. Increasingly, you know, you have lots of opportunities and innovative all to you in terms of innovation, both within kind of traditional pathways in kind of halfway houses on and also outside. So and hopefully they have questions Teo explore and between right, give it to you. So, Doctor, that was fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing your your story s o. I think we could probably pop on one question before Ryan comes through on Do. It was a really good question. So I'm going to scroll back up. Um, so it was from Barry Beth. I hope I pronounce that correctly. It was finding the top. Really interesting. How did you go about in rolling onto a leadership program on Did you need to have any evidence of having a project I d implemented in advance of learning this? How would you advise someone looking to become involved in digital help? I think that's Ah, pretty good question and t question for many people in their minds. Yeah. So there are a few of these lesions programs and a few that are slight, different, you know, way see, and more and more digital have fellowships with initials organizations. And you know, there's a I fellowships that have come out of more fields. And I think in the UK and now, so that so there are more of these opportunities. Some of those need a I can have an idea and something to go into. And so things like the and just clinical entrepreneur program you you go there with an idea, and that doesn't really necessarily mean that. That's the the idea that you go through and kind of work on over that year. But it it shows that you've kind of thought about it. And there's, you know, there's an opportunity to kind of queasy and work through that idea with you and interview in that stuff, and it might well be the idea you go through. But and, you know, I would say, there's there. There are enough opportunities out there with a slightly different focuses. Be that, you know, lesion management and to did you have to kind of change in quality improvement. And so hopefully this there are, you know, opportunities there in terms of getting involved, didn't have. I think it's interesting. So there are, you know, so there are more and more and kind of jobs out that if you go to Doctor um, yours. Oh, you know, there's quite a few Facebook groups around attentive careers, medicine and these kind of things. And so there are jobs out there and Onda there across the spectrum. So some of those are, you know, senior conditions, but more and more of them are people who, you know, maybe have a little bit of experience. Medicine often have needed to do kind of med school, maybe some foundation years. And but it's it's not really the case that I remember being told often that you get your get your completion you know, your CCT, your completion of training man, and then you can think about these other things. And it's not really what we see in terms of lots of these jobs, but no. But the other side of that is that you know, these. These are generally is a huge number of fast growing, a little agile startups in this space and Onda. Most of those kind of CEOs of founders are kind of whatever you want to call us and actually really happy to sit down. You can have a have a coffee in a remotely or in person and explore what you might be interested in on Dwork through that. So we have a few elective students in that kind of stuff every year, and and so I could have wouldn't ask for permission that retired, you know, it's it's kind of saying, reaching out saying left that we can get involved. Most of us are. Instead of that generation, we're actually lots of those opportunities were then. So we often got those kind of breaks by reaching out someone seeing some of the conference, you know, whatever that WAAS. So if you see companies that seem interesting seem like they're doing something that you'd be interested in in getting involved in, And you don't need to be told you got permission to do that just just just can reach out. You know, it's in terms of kind of June doctors medicines like amazing kind of experience. And do not underestimate that knowledge that you have a seat medics and tracing that often you and we can, in a split second tell if in idea is ago or not, where others kind of not gonna versed in that might work on a project for months and months and months of work it up and think it's a great thing. And then you come in and say, you know, you make sense where you get, say so there is a lot of value and definite don't under estimate that, So I think that's fantastic. I think