Welcome to Pulse: Amplify, where we sit down with the leaders and changemakers shaping the future of health.

In this episode Louise and George sit down with Dr Mehmood Khan, CEO of Hevolution Foundation, and Her Royal Highness Princess Dr Haya Bint Khaled Bin Bandar Al Saud, Senior Vice President of Research at Hevolution. Based in Riyadh and backed by Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030, Hevolution is the world's largest philanthropic funder of healthspan science, with over USD $400 million allocated in just three years.

Timed with the release of the second edition of Hevolution's Global Healthspan Report - the most comprehensive look at the field across 23 countries - this conversation moves beyond the longevity hype to explore what it takes to extend healthy human life for the benefit of all.

In this episode:

• Healthspan, not longevity - Why Hevolution is focused on keeping people physically, mentally, and financially independent, and why a global non-profit is the right vehicle for a challenge governments and private enterprise can't tackle alone.
• Why Saudi Arabia, why now - Princess Dr Haya on the demographic shift driving the kingdom's leadership, and why a young population on the brink of ageing is uniquely placed to redesign systems before they break.
• The science that has scientists excited - GLP-1 agonists, senotherapeutics, CRISPR, and cellular reprogramming, and why the real breakthrough is the convergence of these fields, not any one of them in isolation.
• A jaw-dropping case study - Dr Khan walks through how rejuvenating aged liver cells eliminated chronic Hepatitis B in animal models, with first-in-human trials now underway. A profound example of aging biology rewriting the rules for treating incurable diseases.
• What clinicians need to know - Two-thirds of healthcare professionals are now getting monthly healthspan questions from patients. Princess Dr Haya on the shift from reactive to proactive care, and the urgent need for evidence-based healthspan protocols.
• A message for policymakers - Why the Minister of Finance, not just the Minister of Health, needs to be at the table, and why retirement, education, and workforce policies built for a 1%-over-65 world are catastrophically out of date.
• Where digital health innovators should be looking - The five years that could be cut from drug development with better data tools, the four proven interventions that lend themselves to digital monitoring, and why we already have the technology - just not the policy frameworks to deploy it.

Connect with Hevolution on LinkedIn

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This week on Pulse: Hot Topics, Louise and George explore five major developments shaping the future of healthcare.

Microsoft Opens the Lid on How the Public Uses AI for Health — A new Nature Health paper analysing over 617,000 de-identified Copilot health conversations shows nearly one in five are personal health queries, they spike at night when traditional care isn't available, and one in seven are asked on behalf of someone else.

Reddit as a Pharmacovigilance Signal — University of Pennsylvania researchers mined 400,000+ Reddit posts from people taking GLP-1s like Ozempic and Wegovy, surfacing side effects not well captured in trials or drug labelling and revealing a real-time, patient-generated pharmacovigilance system hiding in plain sight.

Apple Walks Into the Radiology Reading Room — Apple's new Studio Display XDR has received FDA clearance for diagnostic radiology at roughly a third of the price of traditional diagnostic monitors, fundamentally changing the economics of building and scaling reading rooms.

US Digital Health VC — AI Is Now the Operating Environment — Silicon Valley Bank and Rock Health data show AI captured nearly half of all healthcare investment in 2025, with Rock Health retiring its "AI deal" tracking category because AI is now table stakes.

The Fourth Wave of Wearables — Bioforecasting — A small study in the European Heart Journal — Digital Health used smartwatch data to predict vasovagal syncope minutes before it happened, signalling a shift from wearables that measure the present to wearables that anticipate what's coming.

Resources:

• Microsoft Copilot Health Queries Study, Nature Health Link
• Reddit GLP-1 Side Effects Study, Nature Health Link
• Apple Studio Display XDR Announcement Link
• Apple White Paper: Reimagining Medical Imaging Link
• SVB 2026 Healthcare Investments & Exits Report Link
• Rock Health Q1 2026 Funding Overview Link
• Prediction of Vasovagal Syncope using AI-enabled Smartwatch PPG, EHJ — Digital Health Link
• Digital Health Workforce Census (opens 1 May, ANZ) — Link

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Welcome to Pulse: Amplify, where we sit down with the leaders and changemakers shaping the future of health.

In this episode Louise and George sit down with Associate Professor Kudzai Kanhutu to explore one of the most profound questions facing healthcare today: what happens to clinician identity, power, and learning when AI becomes part of the team?

We discuss:

• Why clinician identity is the real conversation behind AI adoption
• What a coaching culture actually requires in a hierarchical, time-poor health system
• The gap between compliance-driven AI and genuinely personalised clinical decision support
• Kudzai's vision for AI as a 360-degree professional mirror - drawing on real outcomes data, not vibes
• The COVID lesson: creativity flourishes when compliance is no longer enough
• Why C-suite AI decisions need to be prefaced with a standing invitation to say "you got it wrong"
• Final thoughts: the world doesn't have to end in AI

Connect with Kudzai: LinkedIn

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This week on Pulse: Hot Topics, Louise and George unpack a rapidly shifting healthcare landscape, where AI is no longer theoretical, but already embedded in patient behaviour, clinical risk, and global policy responses. And a big win for the UK’s digital health workforce!

Ireland’s AI Strategy for Health - Ireland releases a national AI for Care strategy, positioning AI as core infrastructure for healthcare delivery, with strong emphasis on governance, workforce integration, and data readiness. A rare example of a country moving beyond pilots into system-wide planning

AI Named #1 Patient Safety Risk - ECRI ranks AI-driven diagnostics as the top patient safety concern for 2026, highlighting risks like automation bias, poor integration, and lack of governance, reframing AI as a clinical safety issue, not just a technology one.

Apple Forces Health Apps Into Regulation - Apple mandates that health apps declare whether they qualify as medical devices, signalling a major shift from platform neutrality to accountability, and potentially reshaping trust, compliance, and developer behaviour globally

Patients Are Already Using AI - New research from KFF, NEJM AI, and The Lancet shows that consumers are actively using AI for health advice, often before seeing a clinician, with evidence that AI is influencing real-world behaviour and reshaping care pathways

NHS Recognises Digital Health Workforce - The NHS formally recognises its digital, data, and technology workforce as a professional group, a major milestone that elevates digital health roles and signals their critical importance to patient outcomes.

Resources:
Horizon Europe Grants Link

Ireland’s AI for Care Strategy 2026-2030 Pulse+IT Link

ECRI 2026 Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns report Link

KFF poll on consumers use of AI in health Link

ESSENCE study, published in the NEJM AI Link

Sara Riggare and Charlotte Blease in Lancet Primary Care Link

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Welcome to Pulse: Amplify, where we sit down with the leaders and changemakers shaping the future of health.

Dr Sara Riggare has spent more than a decade challenging one of healthcare’s most deeply embedded assumptions - that patients are passive recipients of care. Living with Parkinson’s disease and trained as a chemical engineer, she has built a body of work that reframes patients as active producers of knowledge.

In this episode, Sara shares her journey from diagnosis at age 32 to completing a PhD in ‘personal science’, where she studied her own condition to generate new insights into Parkinson’s. Her now-iconic “1 vs 8,765 hours” concept highlights just how little time patients spend in the healthcare system, and how much of their lives, and data, exist outside it.

We explore why healthcare systems still struggle to recognise patient-generated knowledge as valid, and how this creates an epistemic gap at the heart of modern medicine.

This is a powerful discussion about power, knowledge, and what it would take to truly design healthcare around the people who live with disease every day.

Resources:

Patients Are Not Waiting For Permission Lancet

Connect with Sara Riggare: LinkedIn

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This week on Pulse: Hot Topics, Louise and George explore the rapid emergence of AI health assistants from Big Tech, unpack the growing role of consumer wearables as research-grade medical tools, examine how AI scribes are evolving into multimodal and physical devices, and zoom out to a groundbreaking scientific achievement—simulating a living cell.

AI health assistants from Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Perplexity signal a shift from standalone tools to a persistent, orchestrating layer across patient data, raising urgent questions about trust, ownership and the future role of the health system.

A new partnership between Verily and Samsung could turn consumer smartwatches into research-grade data sources, unlocking new possibilities for decentralised trials, digital biomarkers and real-world evidence at scale.

AI scribes are evolving beyond software, with vision-enabled systems dramatically improving accuracy and new purpose-built hardware like Heidi Remote signalling a move toward AI as embedded clinical infrastructure.

And in a remarkable scientific breakthrough, researchers have simulated an entire living cell at the molecular level—opening the door to a future of in silico experimentation and personalised medicine at unprecedented depth.

Resources:
AI Scribe gets eyes npj Digital Medicine Link

Cell Simulation Link

EOI for the Chatbot User Guide for Patients Link

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Welcome to Pulse: Amplify, where we sit down with the leaders and changemakers shaping the future of health.

Guy Tsafnat joins Pulse to unpack why healthcare is “data rich but evidence poor,” and what it really takes to turn messy clinical data into something usable at scale.

He shares hard-earned lessons from building multiple startups, including why sales is harder than technology, how founders should think about co-founders, and why asking for help matters more than perfect pitch decks.

The conversation explores why healthcare data is fundamentally different to other industries, why most data projects stall before delivering value, and what needs to change to make evidence-based care actually work in practice.

Guy also gives a pragmatic take on AI in healthcare—why “rubbish in, rubbish out” still applies, where ambient AI is showing real promise, and why simply layering AI onto poor data won’t change clinical practice.

Finally, he reflects on the realities of building a global health startup from Australia, including the challenges of selling innovation locally and the advantages of lower development costs and strong R&D support.

Connect with Guy Tsafnat: LinkedIn

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Welcome to Pulse: Amplify, where we sit down with the leaders and changemakers shaping the future of health.

A recent Nature Medicine study went viral after reporting that ChatGPT Health under-triaged more than half of emergency cases when tested using clinician-written scenarios. The finding raised serious concerns about whether consumer AI tools are safe for medical triage.

But researchers from Macquarie University’s Australian Institute of Health Innovation took a closer look at the study design and suspected the results might reflect the evaluation format rather than the AI’s clinical capability.

In this episode of Pulse Amplify, Louise and George speak with David Fraile Navarro about their follow-up study testing five frontier AI models across more than a thousand trials. Their research suggests that when AI systems are evaluated using more natural, patient-style interactions rather than exam-style prompts, triage performance improves significantly.

The discussion explores why prompt structure, forced answer formats, and restrictions on clarifying questions can dramatically alter model behaviour, and why designing realistic evaluation methods is essential as millions of people begin using AI for health advice.

The conversation also examines broader questions:
How should AI triage tools be evaluated?
What role should clinicians play in AI-mediated care?
And what do patients need to know before trusting AI with health decisions?

References

Ramaswamy A. et al. (2026). ChatGPT Health performance in a structured test of triage recommendations. Nature Medicine.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04297-7

Fraile Navarro D, Magrabi F, Coiera E. (2026). Evaluation format, not model capability, drives triage failure in the assessment of consumer Health AI. Zenodo.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18975048

Connect with David Fraile Navarro: LinkedIn

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