Emily thought it was just stress.
After two days of brushing off the tight, heavy feeling in her chest, she walked — slowly, breathlessly — into A&E.
What followed? Triage, tests, the wait… the waiting. Eight hours later, she was rushed to ICU.
The stroke was evolving — but it was caught just before it took a serious turn.
For Emily and her partner, the wait was terrifying. For doctors, it’s all too familiar.
Healthcare is rushing headfirst into AI. Robot doctors, automated diagnoses… you’ve seen the headlines.
But the real challenge isn’t building shiny tech — it’s clearing the bottlenecks that leave people like Emily stuck in delays and inefficiencies.
Our business, The Wellbeing Doctors, builds software that helps clinicians focus on patients, not paperwork. It’s a mission that has just earned us a Health BIC grant and 18 months of incubation at Sci-Tech Daresbury, the UK’s leading science and innovation campus.
Healthcare systems are already grappling with interoperability nightmares from fragmented tech. Add AI to the mix and you introduce a new layer of complexity: hallucinations, missing context, thorny ethical dilemmas.
Still, the vision is big: patients owning their health data, clinics running smoothly, and care that’s personalised and timely — all powered by AI.
We’re not building tech to replace doctors: we want to free them from systems that slow them down.
Of course, every revolution stirs the pot. Some roles will shrink. New ones will sprout. But the transformation won’t come with a bang — it’ll be slow, bureaucratic, full of training days and cautious pilots.
And despite all the noise, much of the current AI chatter is just that — hype.
Most systems aren’t mature enough to deliver on their bold promises. For every headline about AI revolutionising care, there’s a quietly shelved pilot or a tool doctors stop using after week one.
As Nik Sharma, NHS consultant stroke physician and adviser to TWD, explains: “Consulting is an art. We don’t just listen to symptoms — we read between the lines.
“We hear the tremble in a voice, catch the hesitation, ask the second question. We see more than what’s on the chart — we see the person.”
So yes, AI will change healthcare. But not with a bang. With a whisper. A keystroke here, a saved minute there, an earlier diagnosis when it matters most.
While AI reshapes the back office, the front line will still depend on something no algorithm can mimic: empathy, trust, and intuition.
Because in a future powered by algorithms, human connection is the differentiator.