Our own co-founder Ben Fehnert, was invited to speak at a panel at the CogX conference this year at the Health Stage about the approaches we should adopt in healthcare in light of new technologies and paradigms influencing medicine.

The CogX conference is all about AI and emerging technologies. This year it was based in King’s Cross, London, with tents and stages scattered around the huge area. Ethics, Health, Work and Education, Innovation and Investment areas and more, the conference aims to cover all aspects of our life benefitting from new technologies.

We are thrilled to have been part of CogX and that Ben could talk about personalised medicine, and the way we should be collecting patients’ data – which are both part of what we work on at Ctrl Group.

The session was titled Time to Change our Profession: A New Hippocratic Oath and was opened by a keynote from Dr Jordan Shlain – a clinician and technologist. He talked about the big issues we’re facing in healthcare at the moment – complex systems, technology aiming to reach corporate, not patient goals, and doctors trying to navigate these problems and save lives at the same time. This manifests itself in lots of money being spent on innovation in healthcare, but life expectancy (in the UK) and patient satisfaction going down:

The main takeaway of his keynote was that we need to start designing for patients, not consumers. Those two personas are radically different. If we focus on providing care to a customer we neglect the anxiety that comes with an illness. Also, the primary customer goal is to acquire something whereas patients are trying to get rid of something.

This prompted Dr Shlain to develop a suggestion for the new, Hippocratic Oath 2.0, which he argues should be taken by all professions interlinked with healthcare – politicians, entrepreneurs, engineers – not just physicians. The proposition focuses on empathy-driven care, transparency of measures and outcomes, giving patients full control over their data and empowering them with accessible information.

Following that, a panel discussion started, moderated by Maxine Mackintosh about the existing Hippocratic Oath points, which were read out from the audience. Together with other guests: Mark Davies from Watson Health, IBM, Cosima Gretton from Mindstrong and Euan Gardner from NHS Scotland and Dr Shlain. Ben talked about the problem of overtreating, empathy as the art of medicine and support we need to provide to clinicians for better wellbeing outcomes.

Ben highlighted that personalised medicine is the solution to the attitudes of “one size fits all” in healthcare. We shouldn’t be treating entire populations in the same way, but develop personalised medicine that would benefit individuals. Equally, the empathetic approach in decision making and collaborative care could be elevated by technology that supports rather than replaces the care team.

At the end, speakers were asked to share their own addition to the Hippocratic Oath; Ben’s echoed the need for recognising each patient individually:

Thank you to CogX for inviting us to this amazing, content packed conference – we have learnt a lot, and we’re looking forward to next year!