#446: Is AI giving clinicians empathy back?

16:33Dr Kishan Rees:And I'm only piecing together this from what I got told now because I have 45 minutes retrograde amnesia. Whoa. But basically a water pipe burst, came off the bike, had a five minute seizure on the pavement. Thank God that there was somebody to hold my neck. It was a nurse. So I didn't have an anoxic brain injury. Air ambulance came out, didn't need me. But Troy Deeney seems to be a recurring theme in this because they cut off all my Watford kit and there was a guy with a Liverpool photo mask and he goes, yeah, we didn't need to cut your kit off, but March 2020 Watford beat Liverpool's unbeaten run and then we would have stayed up, but then COVID happened and then Premier League got locked down and everything else.

17:15Dr Kishan Rees:So yeah, I spent a couple of years kind of rebuilding and literally like rebuilding my brain from a neuroplasticity point of view because there's a little bit of my brain there that is dead and I just feel that it's dead. But yeah, that was...

17:34James Somauroo:What was it like experiencing the healthcare system as a patient from being a doctor? Terrifying. And I hated it. What parts specifically?

17:45Dr Kishan Rees:So like lying in resus, in silence, collared, blocked. And I had a lecture coming up from my med students in a few weeks. I took a photo of myself and then I still use that and say look if there is fear if you want to see a patient with fear in their eyes look at their eyes right or look at my eyes in that and then just like there's no button I can't call I can't shout there's no one there so I literally took a photo there's some good slides of this but I took a photo of the obs behind me I was hypertensive tachycardic high respiratory rate so I started shouting not shouting but look excuse me sorry can you come I was like, can I?

18:22Dr Kishan Rees:And then I asked for IV fluids, IV paracetamol. And then just I had to sort myself out.

18:28James Somauroo:Advocacy for yourself.

18:29Dr Kishan Rees:Yeah. That's why the only reason that I can do that is because I ran trauma calls. So it's like an away fixture, right? I'm a patient in that moment, but I've got the training and knowledge to handle myself in that environment. No patient should or how can any person in that environment, if they don't have medical training advocate for themselves in that space. They can't. It's based on luck and it's based on chance and it's based on you meet somebody who's a good communicator, puts you at ease and gives you what you need to know. So I think that's something that really drives me in terms of healthcare and communications.

19:07Dr Kishan Rees:We've got to do better.

19:09James Somauroo:Yeah. And that is a content theme that we're seeing play out, particularly with a relative lack of public health information, that being now fielded by people with phones doing videos building big profiles millions of people now seeing that taking better action for their health understanding more about their health it can be a massive force for good we see so much about social media and all of the negative and the terrible but there is i think this corner which is of public health which is being taken up by the clinical content creators and you see the world through content as well which is really interesting like so so many of your stories have been like and then I picked up the camera I needed to capture this I can make impact through this it's interesting that you see the world in that way through the impact that you can make from sharing this moment yeah but

20:03Dr Kishan Rees:so I tell you what that's a really good kind of question right because I see the world through through content in the sense that I knew when I was doing my MBA that these were going to take over TV. And they did and they have and streaming. It's all kicked off now. And you say see the world through content. Yeah, this morning in the office, I was like, hold on. Yeah, there's Mike and Mike at Monty. And on the floor, I thought, oh, that's great video. What a great video. So yeah, I do see the world through content and always have done. And I guess always will, but who knows? I mean, the way the world is going with AI and generative and synthetic and all that sort of stuff, I don't know.

20:47Dr Kishan Rees:But yeah, the power of content to connect communities and help people, for sure. For sure.

20:53James Somauroo:Your career then goes from medicine into other things. tech, pharma, media, and you start combining all of this. Can you walk me through that into how that happened?

21:08Dr Kishan Rees:Yeah, there's another conversation with Rami in A &E, one of my mates who's an orthopedic registrar that had left because, I mean, I won't go into why he left, but it was a stupid administrative reason about a parking ticket that was probably the straw that broke the camel's back. That's why he left the NHS.

21:26James Somauroo:There has been no greater story of what junior resident doctors feel than if a parking ticket can be the thing that finally just makes you leave.

21:36Dr Kishan Rees:That was the final straw. He was an orthopedic registrar operating on a lady that had broken her hip at night and he just dumped his car in the hospital. Of course he did. Yeah. Because who wouldn't? Right. And then he ended up getting a parking ticket, but he kept on escalating. He couldn't get rid of her field. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, and it was, Kish, would you mind seeing this patient? I was like, yeah, sure, because he had a head injury, been in there 24 hours and went to see him. And yeah, we got chatting and he goes, oh, Kish, yeah, I've just left. I've gone to do medical affairs. I was like, what's medical affairs?

22:12Dr Kishan Rees:Never even heard of it. And then we're just having a conversation outside by the ambulance bay. We'd always hang out by the ambulance bay, whatever hospital I was in. I did. And yeah, and then he, so that was what, October 2017? I was like, okay, cool. And then by Feb 2018, I'd got a job and handed in my notice and then started AstraZeneca in May 2018. So I decided, okay, let's go. So let's do it. And that was a big, not breaking point, but it was a big decision for me.

22:48James Somauroo:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

22:49Dr Kishan Rees:In the sense that to give up what you know and love. I didn't leave medicine because I hated it. I like medicine. I love clinical medicine. Yeah. Still run the occasional trauma call in the park or whatever when you see people come off their bike. Yeah. But yeah, it was a big, there was a lot of heartache and thinking, should I leave? Should I not leave? What am I giving up? But yeah, super glad that I did. I didn't get to work with Cormac and Eleanor otherwise.

23:15James Somauroo:I can imagine medical affairs for you was, a really good corner of the world to work in good grounding because because actually the idea of well you you tell us like what what what is the idea i was gonna say the idea of

23:37James Somauroo:communicating through content yeah in order to achieve impact yeah that's some of the remit of that department and that is the way that you think that is your framework that's the way that you see the world and so actually the creative problem that pharma companies have of well we've created this drug through r &d that serves these patients in this condition the regulators rightly so say that we can't just stick an advert on tv saying it exists and it will help all these people for these reasons so therefore how do we lead the horse to water how do we make it drink how do we actually allow this drug to create the impact it can for you know chemotherapy and juice nausea and vomiting whatever it is like we need to tell the world that this exists and actually how do we solve that problem it's an interesting it's an interesting place for someone that sees the world through content and media and communication to actually you know draw those lines between the

24:32Dr Kishan Rees:Sure. I mean, so Cham, Harath and James Richardson were your first two bosses in life sciences are really important. And those two hired me because of what I'd done externally, hoping that I could bring that to Pharma and to AstraZeneca. And I think it was a bit of a gamble. And they took a chance because the transition from clinical to corporate, the attrition rate is high because it's a completely different world. And it was almost like, yeah, look, you'll get the medical affairs training. You'll get the signature training. All that stuff will happen. But they had a need, which was education at scale and medical education at scale.

25:14Dr Kishan Rees:To whom? Clinicians? To doctors, nurses, pharmacists, members of the public, everything. So, yeah, we did two things at AstraZeneca. One was Interact Medical Education. And one was something called We Are Well, which was patient-facing content. So I had the absolute pleasure of waiting. coffee um and she's yeah so we did some cool stuff and that was from a uk level company back in the day 2018 uh it was really ahead of its time was that a lot of pressure

25:46James Somauroo:you said they took a gamble on you or a gamble in what they were doing the way they were doing it did you feel that pressure because this is your ticket your ticket out your ticket into this new world like or did we just sublimely confident that you could achieve everything that they were saying

26:03Dr Kishan Rees:at all no so but i don't know whether it was pressure i think it was i looked at what you'd earn in the nhs and i looked at what you'd earn as going into pharma and i kind of thought okay this is different and oh so so so when i joined astrazeneca they were like okay you've got to pass this signature exam um here's a course paid for here all the books paid for off you go and i was

26:28James Somauroo:like what because i was used to this is the thing yeah paying for all the trains to the courses that

26:34Dr Kishan Rees:are mandatory yeah yeah yeah and yeah and i just think it's like um you know i i think without getting too preachy it's a real shame because if people are putting their life on hold to practice medicine and to take on 100 plus K worth of debt, I got out with 26 K. And I looked at that and I thought, okay, that's a year's salary. I can manage that. I can pay that off. And I paid off that debt in my first year of my AstraZeneca job. So it still took from 2009 to 2018, you paid off, right? But you look at it now and the debt that kids go through going through university and especially medical school, if as a country, we want world-class doctors, Why are we not opening up access to allow the brightest minds that might not necessarily have the biggest bank balances in their families?

27:26Dr Kishan Rees:Because it is such a barrier to entry and access. I wouldn't do med school now. There's no way I would, if I was 18 again, say, yeah, I'm going to take on£125 ,000 worth of debt. Because those numbers are just too big for me to comprehend. And I'm not, I wouldn't do it. Especially with the lack of security and things. Yeah, like jobs and all that sort of stuff, for sure.

27:50James Somauroo:Yeah, and it feels like you'd almost do that as part of a plan. It almost feels like the medical degree now would actually, and this is what I've heard from speaking to a lot of people, particularly the medical students now, actually, that they feel the pressure, much as we felt the pressure to, I mean, do an audit or do these things that we were like, oh, there's all this extra work, we've got to do an audit. Yeah, yeah. Now they've got to...

28:12Dr Kishan Rees:Anyone who's watching there, audits are really important. You should definitely do an audit.

28:15James Somauroo:They've got to do a whole other career plan. They've got to really diversify what they're doing. So many becoming content creators, fine, fair enough, but a lot of them are having to look into loads of other things as well. It's a really strange position because you're right. I think if there's one surefire way to actually improve conditions in healthcare full stop, it's finding a way to actually increase the quality of the working conditions for the staff because ultimately the attrition rate is just going to be too high but it's a long arc to achieve that yep there's no single business model that ends up rewarding organizations for treating their staff better and this is a huge problem because staff can't choose to go and work at the place that they are treated better that's just a raffle lottery ticket of of just being placed there right

29:06Dr Kishan Rees:Actually, it is. Even now. So it's a random lottery now in terms of regardless. Even your first jobs. Yeah. My cousin has just gone through Leicester, right? F1, F2, and he's just placed it. He scored really well academically.

29:17James Somauroo:Yeah.

29:18Dr Kishan Rees:But it doesn't matter. Five years of med school, put your name in a hat. You're in Scotland, mate. Off you go. Enjoy. Not that there's anything wrong with Scotland, but if you're living in London.

29:26James Somauroo:Well, if your family's in London, that's a big problem. Yeah.

29:28Dr Kishan Rees:Absolutely. And if you're asking people to provide care and do nights, and you're asking them to do that without a support system

29:35James Somauroo:and structure around them yeah i i hear you i hear you and because people are looking at these other careers like it is it is a genuine it is a genuine way to actually insulate yourself from those bumps now you built a personal brand you actually just said because i wrote it down because of what you had done before in media these people were now looking at you of all you might be able to provide some value because now you're medicine and you're now providing a a lot of value because of the fact you're medicine and it's all it's media understands content understands the way to educate people at scale therefore there might be a role for them you're you know lucky in that someone's then spotted that right and we're all we're all a factor of so much luck as well all of us that have got to you know various positions outside of healthcare but building that personal brand is not just doing the thing it's actually making people aware that you're doing the thing media media is unique it will it will you know it will tell people on its own that you're doing other things but it is important to build a personal brand and that is the advice that I'd be giving anyone going through health care and medicine now or anyone to be perfectly honest yeah what does building a personal brand mean to you was it was it always part of the plan was it deliberate was it something that just happened that you then lends into?

31:00James Somauroo:Like, how did you think about building a personal brand?

31:02Dr Kishan Rees:From a personal brand perspective, no, it wasn't something that I didn't go into this thinking, yeah, I'm going to build a personal brand. But I did notice when people started getting upset, I thought, oh, I wonder why. And I wonder why people are worried about this. And this is with Junior Doctors, because I just saw, I'm just kish, I'm going on the news. And the best feedback I got was when somebody said, oh, look, we saw you explaining about, I don't know, gonorrhea, some resistant strain, antibiotic resistant. And it was exactly the same as when you'd explain it to a patient in a clinic. I was like, great, that's a win, right?

31:34Dr Kishan Rees:So the personal brand thing was a bit of an accident in terms of you need to know. I certainly, and it probably came from a position of knowing what I said, where and how, and I kept the record of everything. Any media appearance I've ever done, I've got a record of it because I want to be consistent and true and also remember to what I've always said, right? You don't want to change which way the wind is blowing, where your position is on something. So I think a personal brand is something that is really important, but I've always looked at the world through brands, not personal brands. Like there's certain companies, there's certain products that I like and I use and I connect with a value system level.

32:17Dr Kishan Rees:And I think the way that we bridged that world was, yes, there was social media, but there was also the real world. So Jack and I would go up to Newcastle. and because I thought if lots of people are going to Newcastle and doing a protest about something junior doctors at the time it was a bit weird that then back in London it wasn't on the news yeah so we thought okay cool we'll just go up and live stream it and we did and we got good numbers but it was the building those connections and it was building that trust between people and communities and we're just doing that on a much larger scale now with the um undoctored truths alliance that we're working with with vernon uh bainton and natasha hansge in terms of medical misinformation is a global threat it is a massive global threat and the only way in a world where you don't know what is real because deep fake and synthetic content is so uh realistic the only way to know is a a trusted network around the world and i'm lucky i've got mates around the world i pick up the phone and say oh what's this new story what's this what's happening um so yeah that's that's the personal brand thing i'd say is a bit of a um accident um because i'm quite happy just being anonymous but i will certainly pop up when i see the need whether that be junior doctors whether that be covid or now whether that be medical misinformation i think as well with

33:46James Somauroo:building that brand within healthcare personally it can be a little bit threatening to people can't it because you're essentially building your own power structure that threatens i've never thought power structures that exist yeah but you wouldn't that was just a complete like uh blind

34:04Dr Kishan Rees:spot or unknown unknown but i think the perception people can see it as that for sure and the the is envy i don't know if that's the right word but when i see somebody with a thousand papers I look at them and think, wow, that's good. What can I learn? I'd love to do that. But it's different in video. When people see 40 Sky News appearances, I had consultants that will remain nameless, say, who the fuck does he think he is? He's not a doctor. He's not a consultant.

34:35Dr Kishan Rees:So, oh, and there was some great people. Oh, we all know Kish isn't a proper doctor. He just wants to be on TV. Now, you ask any of my patients that, like going back to the, you know, when they send me a photo, seeing me on TV. Oh, I did save her life. She perforated on the way to hospital. Wow. Despite being told, go in the back of a cab. And the only reason she was had four-hour laparotomy, it was because she went straight into theatre.

35:03James Somauroo:Wow. That's why I've got a lot of respect, actually, for even the resident doctors now, even, you know, F1s, F2s now, even medical students now that are putting their name in their face out there on socials.

35:15Dr Kishan Rees:And if I can help any of them in any way, I'd love to, happy to, because it's brave, it's much needed. You know, take the core of medical training. And if you can stay away from punting products or subscriptions or just, you know, stuff that people don't need, because so Deborah Cohen is somebody you need to get on here. and Deborah Cohen, she was an ex, well, she's a doctor, medically trained journalist, works for Newsnight in COVID and she's doing a PhD by publication on parasocial relationships where doctors go on social media, they trade off the doctor status, label, badge, whatever. They build trust and a relationship with their audience.

36:05Dr Kishan Rees:Partly, if they weren't a doctor, would people really look at their stuff? Probably not. and then later on in that journey, oh, by the way, sell this, or by the way, buy this. And to me, I just couldn't, I feel very uneasy about that. I'm a doctor or I'm Kish. Or even Dr. Kish is a bit, I've never really liked that. I'm high, in a clinical environment, it'd be, hi, I'm Kish, I'm one of the doctors. So even me rebranding Prepare for FYI YouTube channel as Dr. Kish, I had to really think about that. Do I want to do it or not?

36:37James Somauroo:hmm before i move on to talk about bayer i just want to mention one thing um i've heard you talk about spec savers before as somewhere that honed sorry your communication skills and i think this is just important because people will be might be wondering you know how how do you train in this how do you become good in this what makes you a good communicator and you might not be a born good communicator there might you know that might but you can certainly learn this stuff put yourself in positions where you can learn this stuff a lot more you know episode one two three four five of this podcast probably weren't particularly good and you know it's up to people watching whether it's any good now but but you'd hope you'd hope you'd hope they're a bit better um i'm sure they are but what made you good at communicating do you think back sovers yeah 100 first job

37:28Dr Kishan Rees:So I did what GCSE work experience, age 15, finished there 23, every Sunday, every holiday, earning, not just for the money, but because I loved it. And a change was as good as a break because me blundering through trying to learn stuff with passive learning, right? That was a slog.

37:50James Somauroo:Yeah.

37:50Dr Kishan Rees:So a change was perfect.

37:52James Somauroo:Yeah.

37:53Dr Kishan Rees:And I can remember I worked in the Leicester store because I thought, okay, I've got the Watford store. nailed and i get it and i'd stand it so i could i do a transfer when i'm in leicester so we did a a charity collection where we had a hospital bed um in leicester city sound center the for raising money for the orthopedic society uh we had what was it i got steve the then director at spec savers in leicester to give us some helium um and we gave out helium balloons yeah uh because if you give them a balloon on a stick, it's okay, whatever. But because helium, people think, oh, there's, okay, that's good.

38:32Dr Kishan Rees:So helium balloons, Specsavers helium balloons went out into Leicester. And then as I was driving home, you could see all these balloons going around the periphery around the Leicester walking and carrying them. So you could see how far it went. And we made like 400 quid out of balloons because they felt they had to give something. Was a pound.

38:51James Somauroo:Yeah.

38:51Dr Kishan Rees:And then like, so I had this case full of 400 quid plus just over. So yeah, like, look, I love Specsavers. I love selling glasses to people and I never really sold them. I just explained the benefits. I explained the risks, said, don't worry about it. We'll keep them here safe for you. Come back when you want them. My return rate was really low. My sales rate was really high because it's exactly what I'm doing in medical affairs. It's like you're giving people the pros, the cons, letting them make an informed decision themselves.

39:20James Somauroo:Mm-hmm.

39:22Dr Kishan Rees:And to your point about, you know, you said in the NHS, staff can't necessarily leave and go somewhere. What really honed my communication skills in a commercial and a retail environment was if you met somebody with a face like a wet Wednesday, they're not going to sell anything or buy anything from you and they're going to buy something from somewhere else. So that whole process of coming into store, meeting them, getting to know them, building rapport really quickly. and understanding what they need and selling them only what they need. And because I can remember towards the end of my time at Specsavers, people were introducing me, oh, this is Kier.

39:57Dr Kishan Rees:She's a medical student. He's about to be a doctor. I was like, no, no, no, no, nothing to do with that. I'm an optical advisor. And it was from a nice place. It's from a pride. And they were proud of me. But I was very clear. No, no, no. Put my optical badge advisor on. I'm here. That's it. So, yeah, Specsavers was, I'm so grateful. to you know them as a company and uh what i learned in that watford store with tim and after as it was it's since uh moved hands and changed hands but yeah uh i would it's still my favorite

40:30James Somauroo:job just out of interest did you were you good at it from day one or did or did you enjoy it from day one or were you like fish out of water because i'm putting myself in that position i was introverted i still am like introverted i was a shy kid it kind of would have been probably perfect for me to just throw me into that because i would have i would have learned my learning curve would have been so steep but were you the type of person that would always take to that so i'm more

40:55Dr Kishan Rees:extroverted and i wasn't i was like very green yeah when i went in but i was willing to learn yeah and i can remember the first thing i said to tim mr griffiths don't ever call me that this isn't school okay so tim he's still like he's a mate right and yeah i can remember asking um because I was thinking about something else. And I was like, that'll be 79.99. And I didn't say please. And he pulled me and he goes, Kish, we know that's the price. Okay, great, well done. Just put something before, something after. So yeah, but they provided that fertile ground to learn with safety and structure. And I learned more there than I did the first two and a half years of medical school when it comes to communicating with patients.

41:45Dr Kishan Rees:um so yeah i loved it like the my mates from spec savers um are still like my mates and it was a it was a really good place to forge those skills for sure it's really nice man like you it's

41:59James Somauroo:interesting because thinking about what you do at bayern now you know you're you're a communicator you're a teacher you always have been those things and now your love of media your consistency with your personal brand all of that's now coming together into Bayer right and the role that you have and I was looking at your LinkedIn earlier and I was thinking if I'd have seen when I was a junior if I'd have seen some like a doctor that with the job title that you have now I'd have done absolutely with where my hobbies were and everything I didn't I didn't absolutely everything in my power to meet you and learn from you and figure out how on earth I would get to anywhere or what you're doing so for people to understand what you do yeah tell us tell us the title but then tell us like what you actually do and what you feel you're actually doing for Bayer and therefore what you're doing out for the world and for patients yeah we we sit in a team called

42:57Dr Kishan Rees:patient scientific engagement which is a group of 45 of the most bright talented funny nice kind people predominantly who are working in scientific communications and we basically help people become content ambassadors. So, you know, the power of content and the power of good content can change lives, but the power of bad, shoddly put together content can also harm. So we're building those structures, those processes, those frameworks, so people can get the benefits and the positives of all this tech and all these devices and ultimately catalyze the communication of Congress science. So when I was a frontline physician, I had no idea about any of these Congresses that we go around the world to.

43:44Dr Kishan Rees:And that's why the Bayer app branding and principle came into place where if we can accelerate the knowledge and the conversations that happen globally at Congresses to frontline clinicians, then we can help drive real practice change around the world. Wow. So yeah, it's a dream job and I'm very lucky to do what I do. But to take it back to your question, I didn't even know that this job would exist when I was coming into pharma. Yeah. And I think if you look at the world now, I think the jobs that the next generation will be doing don't exist. So I think it's keep curious, keep calm and keep away from some of these devices because is like the screen time health emergency where you're just constantly bombarded with rubbish is not going to let anybody focus on anything.

44:40Dr Kishan Rees:But upskill and train and understand what these great AI tools can give you because they will open up careers and opportunities that don't exist today. Yeah. No doubt. Yeah. Well, everything I do now did not exist when I started.

44:56James Somauroo:I have a podcast. They didn't exist. Yeah. I run a health tech and biotech comms agency. Well, they didn't exist. You know, nothing that I do know even existed. And it was just a case of following what I was interested in whilst it was all being created. And being someone that's, you know, interested in the innovation and innovative side of things, you're always at that frontier of what's being created. And so, yeah, that is the nice thing. And it's great that, you know, a company like Bayer is thinking of it in that way as well, in order to keep moving with the times. that is also important that comes down to the people as well right yeah it's the people it's

45:34Dr Kishan Rees:the leadership it's all sorts but but i think just if you think about when we're at med school the tech like you know if somebody said to me that you'd have that that can pick up you've got covid before you have it or you've got this where you could fall and it can uh dial an ambulance or you've got this that does all sorts of stuff this is my latest toy so so so yeah i i think the The future is bright. The future, the potential is huge. So we've gone from a search to social era and we're now in this generative search and chat era. We have not learned the lessons of deploying social media to populations.

46:17Dr Kishan Rees:And I see all the same errors happening or mistakes or unforced errors happening where we're rushing forward with generative conversational AI and chat and search. so I think if people do uh detach from devices there's a whole world out there you've got you know super high res vision 4k whatever you've got a quantum computer as a brain enjoy the world try not to live it through these screens which might sound ironic from somebody that works in digital and loves content right um but as a physician as a doctor first and foremost I don't need a randomized controlled trial to know the difference that this did to me by detaching from it and using it mindfully.

47:02James Somauroo:I think, I was speaking to a few people on this and the conclusion seems to be that we're unfortunately the generation that's going through social media and you could apply generative in there as well, but we're the ones pre-regulation. If you look at the smoking timeline we're the we're in the point now where they were saying smoking's good for you doctors were saying smoking's good for you we're in we're almost there or slightly slightly beyond there perhaps of like very early days before like our grandkids are probably going to look at us and go i can't believe that you had unfettered access to social media whenever you wanted it and you you were allowed to just sit there for eight hours like that's unbelievable much in the same way now you look at chain smoking where you look at you know alcohol or the rest of it and yes that it's still an option you're still a free to citizen to do that but now the education has got caught up which again is like a medical affairs thing right like the role of a department like yours and what you do is to make sure that the frontier of education is also going at the same pace as the technology or at least close so that we're educating people on what this technology is is doing to people and all the rest of it just on that point right so one of the slides that

48:19Dr Kishan Rees:we did and I built this with ChatGPT and it was helpful to visualize it. When we're at the next medical festival talking about the Undoctored Truths Alliance, there's this great slide, and I can send it to you afterwards if you want it, but it's the tortoise and hare of regulation versus innovation. And the good that can come from innovation is amazing. I'm not knocking that right we are uh Spencer's uh we had a chat the other day on um my podcast if you can call it that nothing to this level um and he goes look functionally we are gods with the stuff that this tech gives us we are god um so that the innovation that that gives is great but we just need to be able to regulate it quicker and we need to be able to provide guardrails and educate and help people better so that people don't fall through the cracks because whether it's smoking vaping social media various uh advances and innovation if it's not regulated

49:23James Somauroo:harm happens with your work at bayern it's interesting because you said two things good content can do great things bad content can harm do you have specific work streams of activity that look at both of those things specifically what on a practical level like what are you what do you guys do what projects do you do what do you aim for what metrics do you look at how do you measure that what you're doing is what you set out to do like all of that sort of stuff

49:53Dr Kishan Rees:yeah so i think vanity metrics we avoid yeah right um because it's okay i'd kind of phrase it this way right so what we do is we've got something called decam it's a digital content acceleration method where literally from concept to can to customer, we've got end-to-end oversight off a piece of content. We know where it is in this. It doesn't sound like that revolutionary, but we know where it is in the system, who the audience is for, what we're hoping to achieve with it. So we're basically bringing media and broadcast media and journalism into Bayer. and that's only because i've hung out with journalists and we're rebuilding something that happens in another regulated sphere which is journalism and you know when covid lockdowns happened and you know i was uh able to be out and about because i'm medical journalist and i had a journalism card like medical journalist association that's it right so and i could do it in a safe way from the surgical training to make sure that i'm not going to infect somebody and had respirator and whatever else, the early stages.

51:04Dr Kishan Rees:So we're bringing in knowledge. We're bringing in experiences from other sectors and other industries to how can that help us do and achieve our bread and butter.

51:17James Somauroo:So what exactly are you measuring then? How do you personally go, I've done a good job this month, this year? Is it proxies for how many people you've helped? Or is it like stories when you're out and about, people saying that they've seen your stuff? Yeah.

51:30Dr Kishan Rees:Yeah. So there's anecdotal stuff. Like when, if somebody walks into one of our studios around the world, and there's one happening now down the road in London, like smaller scale. But EAU, like prep before EAU in London. So if somebody walks into one of our studios and they're wowed and they think, okay, cool. And they get a good experience, a seamless experience from meeting Eleanor at the door to being mic'd up by Cormac to maybe having a sit down with me and they leave and they're happy with that. That's great. So there's that personal level of white glove service, right? Because we work with and we have the pleasure of working with and learning from some of the best experts in their fields in the world, right?

52:22Dr Kishan Rees:Across therapy areas. So that's a metric for sure. But also if we can help teams understand content and help them communicate their message, then great. I mean, we did, there's something called Health Matters. We've done season one of Health Matters. And season two is yet to come out because there's capacity issues. I mean, you just get it signed up. We've got almost too much content, right? Which is a nice place to be. It is. Especially if it's evergreen content because all the stuff we're talking about, social media bans now in the wider world and screen time and brain rot. We filmed season two of Health Matters this time last year.

53:02Dr Kishan Rees:And it's, I'd say, I don't know what, 80 % done? 90 % done? What do we think? Looking to Eleanor. Eleanor, no. In Eleanor, we trust. Yeah. So by taking that journalistic view and reading source material that is way outside of our ballpark, we could go, if we put, when we move, we move. So that means what? It's March. Say we decided 1st of April, we could literally have all of April every three or four days, one of the 14 episodes coming out. Yeah, yeah. And we're talking about transitions of care, warm handoffs of care with Actway Desai, who's an amazing cardiologist in the States. We're talking about destigmatizing obesity.

53:48Dr Kishan Rees:With various people, right? So we've got really good content. And then it's just a case of getting into the world in a format that helps people.

53:57James Somauroo:How do you think about that bit? Because that bit I think is becoming one of the most important elements is the distribution. Because I think you're right, everyone has devices. The production quality that's expected and actually the production quality that's most engaging is much lower than it used to be. You don't need to have broadcast style stuff for it to be impactful now. And actually people are winning just on the size and the ability and the ease of their distribution.

54:27Dr Kishan Rees:So it's a great question. And we do everything from phone to broadcast and everything in between.

54:33James Somauroo:Yeah.

54:33Dr Kishan Rees:Right.

54:34James Somauroo:So you shoot low res stuff, just selfie camera. Yeah. Yeah.

54:38Dr Kishan Rees:So we've got various different media brands. so Bayarat, the Congress, journalistic, news type stuff. Yeah. We've got other ones like medical education and whatever. GMAX is called Global Medical Education Exchange. But then we've got basically opportunities to train people in the business with media and get in front of camera and do stuff. And then the pinnacle of it is Health Matters where there's seven episodes in season one, 13 episodes in season two and two oncology episodes in season three because that is a brand that has been built it started off with poppy and i pop and doc great but it's a brand and it's it's digital equity and real estate for bea so that we can train other hosts and other presenters nice so it's health matters conversations with um and we've got interest in in women's health and some other other therapy areas as well and we're training enough people so we literally we've got that media on the shelf okay you want to do this here we go this is this it's a system it's

55:47James Somauroo:future-proofed as well isn't it because you're training the next generation at the same time as creating the content it's quite interesting it's like it's just a full media production company within Bayer basically is what you're running from the sounds of things which you can argue most if not all companies these days need to be their own production companies to some extent with the way the content's going yeah um before i let you go man we obviously met recently at the endava hackathon yeah that we were at together yeah and i think we both similarly had a reflection of world's come quite far since we were training amazing isn't it i for people for i guess for listening to people watching this hackathon we you tell it tell us what that hackathon was and your reflections on it.

56:35Dr Kishan Rees:So I was actually poorly in December, lying in bed, feeling a bit sorry for myself when Tom texted me on LinkedIn and goes, oh, do you want to come to Hackathon? When Tom invited me to come and judge that, I'll be honest, I felt a bit uncomfortable. Happy to help out.

56:51James Somauroo:Yeah, okay. I'm a doctor. Yeah, I understand healthcare, but I can't judge what these guys... So funny. I thought the same thing. did you i honestly i thought the same thing i it's so funny man i talk about this i'm i'm hiding in plain sight here because i host something called the health tech podcast yeah and i've not coded

57:12Dr Kishan Rees:a piece of tech in my life it's crazy that i talk about tech so much but i talk about more about the

57:18James Somauroo:adoption of it and like how it fits into patient care and all stuff that's comfortable for us of how we've used tech on that level and how it might interface the patients the rest of it so but the build the building of it i'm in no place i'm in no place it is not my business whatsoever to judge people for how they build tech but yeah yeah same thought but i i kind of you provide a

57:36Dr Kishan Rees:platform and a forum for people to have conversations and you learn stuff along the way and that's like you know similar to some of the stuff that i've done with covid and research and things but yeah so when tom asked i was like look happy to but would you mind if i just sit there and do some work and kind of watched them doing it so i was like yeah sure um so like to see uh team Bucharest i think andrew binns called them i don't know if that's actually their name their team name but he called them team Bucharest um like coding a new feature every 20 minutes by the end of it it was just alex leading that team and for me it was really interesting you had alex and like his colleague i forget his name but senior coders and then you had junior coders starting off with ai but the silent, not power, it's the wrong word, but the silent glue that held that team together was I think her name was Victoria and she was bridging between hardcore AI, sorry, hardcore non-AI human coders and next generation AI.

58:40Dr Kishan Rees:And to me, I thought I left that thinking, yeah, all of the teams were really good. All of the teams had ethics and human care and decency at the heart of whatever product they wanted to build, which was really important. But for me, that showed me a model which being applied similar to what we do, like we can bridge between next generation and millennials and whatever else. But yeah, that when I saw that, I was like, wow, that was really good to watch and see.

59:11James Somauroo:one of my reflections on it was that i ran you know a couple of health tech accelerators earlier in my career and the things that i saw built from scratch just off two million synthetic patient records yeah uh far out like far far far outweighed outstripped outperformed like what i would see then as what what was innovative only eight nine years ago pales into insignificance really compared to what is innovative now and that's the way it should be right but it's funny because it doesn't feel like to me i've been in this a long time i've been here clearly long enough to see an entire generational change in what building technology now means that you can whack something into lovable, get a decent front end, half a back end, but then the coding can come in.

1:00:11James Somauroo:Whatever they did from the technology perspective to create the outputs they had created. And by the way, it was things like they were picking up, they were looking at longitudinal healthcare records and picking up rare disease. They were picking up the progression of chronic disease against certain parameters to then flag and alert and all of that yeah you can say was around nine ten years ago but they've built that within half a day from scratch and none of them have any experience or knowledge in healthcare and this is the thing they did and they did that by using AI to understand the personas of the people that they were building for and they were each given different personas of people to build for and without any healthcare knowledge built for those personas to the point where even for the team you just mentioned they built a specific part of the dashboard that looked at the finances and the reimbursement because of the fact that that could be used then for education and this and that and the other and obviously the finance department all the rest of it it was it was just this it was a crazy just level of detail that was being created i don't I know it did kind of blow me away that I need to be involved in that stuff a bit more to understand what's coming over the horizon because is it scary for patients that stuff?

1:01:36James Somauroo:Is it scary for physicians?

1:01:37Dr Kishan Rees:I think a lot of people probably don't even know about it. So ignorance can be bliss in a certain degree. But I do think, I tell you what, I was thinking about this on the way in, right? What is scary as doctors is we've almost taken, We have to take ownership and accountability for communication in the sense that if members of the public are willing to throw, not even throw their details in yet, but to ask intimate personal questions about their health to large language models of any variety and any flavor. There's a little bit of me inside saying, oh, what a shame that from a doctor, patient, human interaction that as a profession, we hadn't quite managed to get that connection sorted.

1:02:23Dr Kishan Rees:interesting yeah and i i think there's so many questions about some of my mates have never been on facebook all right uh and i've tried and they won't and they're quite happy without it two in particular and i do think in 10 15 years time we'll see the people that have thrown loads of stuff into large language models and the people that haven't and i think there will be different consequences as a result because all of the data this is just a massive training exercise so all of the data that we put in the so what and who owns it where does it go and what happens and this isn't me being critical i've had thousands of chats with lots of different ai's but i've been thoughtful of okay well this information i go with this company or this information i do this one or that one i'm never going to put in and i think that level of health literacy for interacting with these tools is really important um but let's take it back a step which is we can improve uh trusted nice kind compassionate conversations between healthcare professional and patient we do not need an ai if we focus on what we are trained to do and eric topple talked about when he did the Topper review.

1:03:50Dr Kishan Rees:How do we use AI to release time to care? And, you know, ambient AI, great, fantastic. That if I was working clinically full time now, that would be a game changer, right? Because you can actually sit down and listen. But if you look at, there's so many patients that don't see a doctor, they see the back of somebody's head typing. And I think we've got to do better. As doctors, we have to do better. That is not what we went to med school for, to just sit there typing and somebody talking to the back of your head.

1:04:23James Somauroo:I don't think there's a doctor on earth that would want that either.

1:04:27Dr Kishan Rees:No, I agree. That's the thing. We've just allowed it to happen to ourselves.

1:04:30James Somauroo:And that's where it just feels a shame, isn't it? And it feels like for those individual clinicians, these are the people that you're talking to and educating all the time, so you'll know this more than me, but they don't want to be working in a system that spreads them so thinly. They don't want to be in a consultation time that is so low that they have to, because if they don't show that patient the back of their head, they might show the wrong patient the back of the head and miss something. Or they're trying to do that because they might not get to the end of the day or whatever it is. There is so much pressure on people.

1:05:02James Somauroo:And you're right, releasing time to care. it was funny because it's almost like parodied of how much that is said and how much we even talk about all of this tech releases time, releases time, releases time. We need to find the model that actually does it.

1:05:20Dr Kishan Rees:I agree. And I tell you what, if you look at my day-to-day, right, corporate world, this tech does release time and we don't have to write minutes of meetings. That's great. It just does it for us. It's all there. But look at the teams and look at the people that have back-to-back meetings 16 hours a day. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. And the teams that we work with and the stuff that we do is there's blocks of time. And what's the outcome? What do we want to achieve? How are we going to do it? And let's just do one thing at a time well and then get really good at it, build the muscle memory, and then you can almost execute in your sleep.

1:06:00Dr Kishan Rees:and and these tools even if you can't execute in your sleep these tools that are coming will automate all of these workflows yeah um so yeah i i think finding that model is the i don't know maybe you'll find it maybe you'll get a guest on here that comes on and does it because it's through these kind of fora these kind of conversations that you will uh allow those conversations that the time and the space to to that they need to happen it's been a pleasure um what is before

1:06:29James Somauroo:Before we finish, final question. What's one thing you're super excited about at the minute, whether it's a technology, whether it's a project you've got going on at Bayer, whether it's a particular app on your phone or the opposite, I don't know. What are you excited about at the minute?

1:06:46Dr Kishan Rees:I'm excited about building something.

1:06:50James Somauroo:Interesting.

1:06:51Dr Kishan Rees:So hanging out with Cormac, hanging out with Eleanor, building something that actually makes a difference, that actually matters. Having a laugh when you go to work. Don't get me wrong, be bloody good at what we do and be world class at something, but do it in a way that is a bit of a joy.

1:07:09James Somauroo:Nice. That's a David Brent philosophy, isn't it?

1:07:15Dr Kishan Rees:Is that...

1:07:16James Somauroo:I don't know, but it's how we think. You did that.

1:07:19Dr Kishan Rees:He wanted that deliberately.

1:07:29The order lowest subverse