Don’t know why but recently had a flurry of emails from this forum after a long period of silence and, as ever, interesting stuff.
@Marcus - Your comment below made me chuckle… maybe that was me once? Didn’t know about your channel - what I’ve watched so far… it’s good stuff.
On 28 Oct 2025, at 12:38, Marcus Baw via openhealthhub.org <noreply@openhealthhub.org> wrote:
Many of the existing Health Tech YT channels I’d noticed were run by relatively inexperienced doctors who were terribly excited about - so over the past years it’s been Big Data, Blockchain, AI, Startups, mHealth, Wearables etc. But not much in the way of warts-and-all real tech discussion.
It’s a tricky balance isn’t it. Like you, I’m a GP (now getting closer to retirement) and a passionate believer in the power of tech for good in health. I think appropriately so, I’m cautious about . Got a new partner for whom AI is the golden goose and all tech related challenges are “we just need to do X…” as if we haven’t walked this path before oh so many times. My tech lens dates back to something like the mid 80s and my health tech one… 1990? Just realised I speak more programming languages than human ones by quite a big margin. That’s a bit sad isn’t it? Who needs Esperanto when there’s C from before C++ was even a thing… never mind Perl, Python and Go…
The points you make about the silo mentality - so true… so how, for those who actually care about the fundamentals, do we fix it? How do we get from “AI will revolutionise everything in medicine” back to “you know when you change the medicines during an admission… be good to know that and not to have to retype everything”. That would make my day to day that little bit easier and improve care and allow me to focus a little more on direct patient care and educating the next generation and that, sort of important stuff, rather than “yeah, I can add that 2 week script you’re not setup to do yourself. Any other menial tasks I can do for you today and which waste the substantial public investment in me ?" 
I know I’m preaching to the converted on this forum… but 35y or so I’ve been waiting for tech to deliver and be less palantir golden goose… what are we getting wrong? Why is getting / using basic obvious stuff a mystery worthy of the great Sherlock Holmes? When I think back to stuff I’ve tried to do… always seemed easier to stop kicking the dinosaur and hoping it would notice and just to hack round what I could control / get info about / infer and stack trace. Anything really worthwhile…. there’s an NDA before I can talk to the subcommittee of the subcommittee of the committee that…. sorry, fell asleep there, who might be able to tell me “No, you can’t”. After a while… that barcode scanner off Amazon plus some VBA in Excel…. yeah… it’s hacky as feck…. but it’s actually making a difference that helps patient care whereas that really carefully written thing about event driven healthcare that I contributed into the EHR discussion in the Trust… oh look, tumbleweed.
After a while, doing rage, rage against the dying of the light risks becoming “Yeah… tried that… yep… that too… yes…. that as well…I know…no, you’d think that wouldn’t you… but no”.
For those of us getting longer of (health tech) tooth… are we those dinosaurs now? Are we the ones saying “Well, if you do that…. you’ve got to allow for <30 minutes of history based boredom later>”?
How do we harness that Hugo Cornwall’esque passion to explore and help against the corporate healthcare wall of meh? How do I help my idealistic partner not become the (gently) cynical me in a couple of decades?
Iain