Steven Hamblin (#005)
People ask why clinicians burn out, and I respond by saying “why wouldn’t they, when these are the tools we give them?” It doesn’t have to be like this.
Company: Dyad
Headcount: 10
Stage: Seed
Tell us your story
I was one of those kids who picked up a computer at an early age and never put it down again. I ended up becoming a biologist and biostatistician through a series of adventures during my time in undergrad and grad school. I got my first taste of startup life while doing my second postdoc in LA and I decided to make the jump full time into industry. My visa was up in the US, though, so I asked my wife where she wanted to live next and she said London, so away we went!
When I got to the UK I enrolled in Science To Data Science (S2DS) to get a feeling for the industry out here but ended up getting a job with Babylon Health right away. That turned out to be a pivotal moment in my career. I joined Babylon early on and was one of their first data scientists, which helped me to have a big impact on their early AI approach. I ended up building the first AI team there as well as helping deliver the first AI tech and products, which was a formative experience. I’m grateful to all the fantastic people I worked with. I learned an enormous amount during my time there, including about the product and business side of startups, which are educational opportunities that you just can’t pay for.
After I left Babylon, I co-founded a small insurtech startup that didn’t work out. I then had another fortunate encounter that led to me taking the CTO role at what would go on to become Sensyne Health. That too was an amazing experience; alongside growing the clinical software teams delivering into the NHS, I was able to watch the business grow from a handful of people in a room all the way through to IPO. Along the way, I solidified my firmly-held belief that in tech startups, tech and operations are two sides of the same coin, something I appreciated first hand when taking a COO role during my time there.
After leaving Sensyne, I took a bit of a break from health tech and joined a London-based startup doing logistics and supply chain AI called Clear AI as CTO. From my time at Sensyne and Babylon, I was still very interested in the logistical and operational components of healthcare that live upstream of point of care. The problems that I saw there really struck me and burned away in my mind. The PPE crisis of earlier last year was a perfect example of these issues for me, and I continued to think about what I might be able to do about them. So, when Clear (unfortunately) fell victim to the pandemic, I felt like now was the time to try doing something about it. I pulled together some people and found some money from some great investors to start a new company called Dyad, which is dedicated to tackling some of these problems by re-imagining how we work with data in healthcare.
Tell us a story that has really resonated with you
I think that one of the books I’ve read lately that stuck with me the most is ‘Range’ by David Epstein.
In it, he argues that generalism, cultivating and drawing on a wide variety of skills and experiences as opposed to ruthlessly specialising, is a valid approach to excelling in our work. Though I try to avoid taking any one viewpoint like this too far, his argument resonated with me because I’ve spent too much time worrying about the fact that I’ve had a varied background. It’s not an uncommon fear, but it can be pernicious. I found the shift in perspective really freeing!
What can't you stop thinking about?
One of the reasons that I’m working in health tech is because the people who deliver in healthcare deserve better.
Recently, we talked to a department in a large NHS Trust who asked us if we could help them with their scheduling woes. When we dug beneath the surface, it turns out that to get their rota (their schedule) done so that the right mix of skills are available and people have at least some shot at a work-life balance, they go through something like this:
To produce the rota, they begin by entering data into 4 different IT packages, none of which interoperate with each other, so they have to copy between the different packages by hand (including pen and paper!).
When they get to the fourth package, it still doesn’t produce the rota correctly, so they print it out and distribute it by hand with corrections to fix the problems.
Then, they have to retrofit that fixed schedule back into the last package so that everyone gets paid.
Oh, and the key package in that list runs on Adobe Flash, which Adobe has said they will start actively disabling beginning mid-Jan 2021.
I can’t stop thinking about this, because it epitomises the situation we put these people in and frankly, it’s insane. People ask why clinicians burn out, and I respond by saying “why wouldn’t they, when these are the tools we give them?” It doesn’t have to be like this. This isn’t any one person’s fault. It’s not the fault of the staff, it’s not the Trust’s fault, it’s not even the IT vendor’s fault. It’s a consequence of how we structure and deliver healthcare as a society, and it’s something we bear collective responsibility for. So we need to fix it.
If I could tell you just one thing...
Learn servant leadership, and practice it. And read “Leadership is a gift. It’s given by those who follow.”
If you could get a warm intro to anyone in the world, who would it be and why?
If you’ll allow me, I’m going to cop out of this question. The reason is that a question like this worries me: if I’m asked who I would most like to meet, it’ll almost certainly be someone that aligns with my own viewpoints on the world, my own biases, and my own preconceived notions of what’s valuable and what I need. It’s difficult if not impossible to escape those self-imposed shackles, so I would answer by saying: I would love to have a warm intro to the last person in the world I’d expect, someone I would never have thought to ask to meet and won’t come across in my daily life. I’m certain to learn more from a conversation like that than an intro to a famous person who makes me feel good about my own choices because they’re a reflection of them.
(That said, there *are* plenty of famous people I hope I get to meet some day. I’d love to pick Geoff Hinton’s brain someday, or pair for a while with Guido van Rossum, or have lunch with Emmanuelle Charpentier or Jennifer Doudna, or several dozen others. But given the choice, I’d prefer you surprise me!).