Fellowship Bio

A GP registrar with experience in early-stage digital health startups, holding Master’s degrees in Health Economics and Genomic Medicine. He aims to advance his work in artificial intelligence through a PhD and industry engagement, all while maintaining his clinical practice.

Ambient Voice Technologies (AVTs) are AI tools that listen to a consultation between a clinician and their patient, documenting what is discussed. They help summarise medical notes, freeing up clinicians to focus fully on their patients, and speed up documentation and referrals. However, they can sometimes make errors or hallucinate details. The hope is that they can be used to improve the efficiency within primary care while reducing burnout. The goal of this project was to evaluate the use and perception of AVTs in primary care across South East London. I focused on several key areas, including tool selection, the implementation process, practice level monitoring, clinician and patient experience, clinician burn-out, safety, documentation, coding, and the experiences of neurodiverse staff. I engaged with stakeholders to understand the project requirements and collaborated with a skilled project manager. I designed a survey and conducted hour-long interviews with several clinicians to get deeper insights. I then analysed the findings from both the survey and the interviews, to write an evaluation report, and summarised these insights in my graduation poster. We successfully completed the evaluation report and the poster. However, because the survey was distributed during peak annual leave, the response rate was limited. To build on this work, the survey should be repeated during a typical working period. Future steps should also include evaluating the impact of AVTs on GP registrars and clinician training, capturing objective usage data directly from technology suppliers, and formally consulting local patient participation groups.

Fellowship Testimonial

Going from juggling multiple master’s degrees, a part-time start-up, and a full-time job to having dedicated fellowship time was actually my biggest challenge. Navigating NHS bureaucracy was another hurdle; having project funding repeatedly withdrawn and needing to pivot was demotivating. However, pushing through these setbacks built up my discipline and resilience. Throughout the programme, I largely focused on evaluating AI tools and doing Clinical Safety Officer (CSO) work, which gave me invaluable practical exposure to AI governance. What I enjoyed most was having two dedicated days a week to focus purely on these projects. It was a luxury I’d never had before, giving me the breathing room to dive deep into clinical safety standards and explore how AI can be safely integrated into care. This experience has given me a lot of clarity about my future, and ultimately I hope this fellowship will pave the way for academic endeavours like a PhD, while also keeping a foot in the industry, with the long-term goal of eventually launching my own clinical AI start-up.