Can femtech help the NHS? In our brand new Femtech TV series no other than DigitalHealth.London’s Jenny Thomas sits down with experts from across the NHS and UK digital health ecosystem to explore just that! Tune in and and if you like check out the other episodes in this series on Femtech TV!
In this episode, Jenny Thomas speaks with Dr. Hiba Saleem, Associate Chief Clinical Digital Officer at Hillington Hospitals NHS FT and Obs & Gynae Doctor at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, who joins her live from a London NHS hospital for the interview.
Dr Hiba Saleem was the perfect person for a ‘Can Femtech Help the NHS?’ interview. She’s considered as a rising star by NHS CIOs and is the Associate Chief Clinical Digital Officer at a London NHS hospital. Perhaps most importantly she’s also a practicicing obstetrics & gynecology doctor and heads up partnerships and opportunities at Doctorpreneurs. Like me, Hiba is passionate about bringing together her two favorite things – women’s health and digital health.
In our conversation we talk about the pain points and opportunities that she sees within women’s health. Hiba is keen to start simple by connecting women and clinicians better – for example through collecting better data antenatally to provide more personalized care and providing women experiencing the menopause with more education and different care options.
Tune in to hear what Hiba has been working on in her digital leadership role – including work taking place in gynaecology clinics, collaborations with SMEs like DrDoctor and Patients Know Best and the awesome ‘Digital Den’ initiative at her hospital where staff and SMEs alike get to pitch pain points and solutions. Established some years ago by now NHSX CIO, Sonia Patel, initiatives like the Digital Den are great examples of getting digital best practices in the NHS. These initiatives have led to some amazing collaborations including an opportunity for us at DigitalHealth.london to introduce start up Infinity Health which led to them transforming how requests for porters in the hospital’s emergency department were coordinated (think Uber for hospital portering).
Hiba is very honest and says “I don’t think we talk about femtech enough yet in the NHS. It’s early days. We’re only just getting started.” She is excited about all the opportunities to use technology as a force for good. A solution she absolutely loves is Proximie, an AR platform for surgery which allows surgeons to virtually scrub into any operating theater in the world. Technology like this allows support for operations like hysterectomies and stage 4 endometriosis particularly in the developing world to improve equality of care. She’s excited that solutions like Elvie are now available through the NHS and how much more will be achieved by bringing femtech to the NHS over the next 5-10 years.
