Healthcare and business: How medical trends are evolving following the pandemic

Health care leaders from the worlds of medicine, pharmaceuticals, vaccines and technology met at Bayes Business School to discuss how the latest trends intersecting healthcare and business are affecting the world, post-Covid.

Organised by faculty from the Executive Masters in Medical Leadership and Bayes Global Healthcare Society, ‘The Business of Healthcare’ featured a number of individual presentations followed by a panel discussion, entitled ‘The best of both worlds: cherry picking from the NHS and the private sector.’

The afternoon sessions were opened by neurologist Dr Nik Sharma, CEO of BioCorteX, who led a talk titled ‘The Microbiome's Influence on the Pharmaceutical Pipeline’. Dr Sharma said there was “overwhelming evidence of a complex relationship” between the gut microbiome and medications affecting all stages of the pharmaceutical pipeline.

Bradley Hardiman, Senior Director at Astellas Europe, spoke about ‘The Business of Biotech: How Does Bio-investment Work and What Has Changed with the Pandemic?’.

Mr Hardiman outlined the changes of the biotech industry in recent years, in particular because of the pandemic. He said, “biotech is a long game, and you need to find patient investors”.

Tomás Sabat Stöfsel, COO of Vaticle, led a session called ‘Creating a Unified Representation of Data in Healthcare’, to discuss how the TypeDB database was increasing the probability of ground-breaking discoveries.

The final afternoon session was about ‘how AI is transforming healthcare?’, led by Dr Keith Grimes, Clinical Digital Health & Innovation Director at Babylon Healthcare. Dr Grimes outlined how AI is supporting GPs to make more informed decisions and help manage healthcare more effectively.

The evening’s panel discussion was chaired by Dr Ruth McCabe and included Professor Richard Cohen, Professor of Surgery at University College London and Medical  Director (Deputy) of Cleveland Clinic UK, Dr Adrian Cree, Group Medical Director at the Priory Group; Dr Kate Oakland, Director of Medical Services at HCA Healthcare UK; Dr Sanjiv Sharma, Medical Director at Great Ormond Street Hospital; Dr Chris Streather, Group Chief Medical Director at Royal Free London Group and Dr Lopa Winters, Leadership Consultant/Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist.

The panel was chaired by Dr Ruth McCabe who posed questions to the panel for discussion including: Where is the new balance for organisations in the delivery of NHS versus private clinical work? What are the main differences from an employee perspective between the NHS and the private sector? The panel also discussed the workforce and talent management, and which strategies were being employed to retain healthcare workers within the public and private sectors.

Dr Amanda Goodall, Course Director, Executive Master’s in Medical Leadership, said: “Healthcare in the UK is under pressure like never before. Our panel consisted of doctors because effective change will only come about when they are in leadership positions with the necessary power and resources to tackle persistent problems like the patient backlog, staffing shortages and resource allocation.”

For more information on Bayes’ Executive Master’s in Medical Leadership, visit the Bayes website.

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