The Startup Leap: One Doctor’s Path from Medicine to Product Innovation with Dr. Kieran McLeod

In this episode on Startup Physicians, I had the chance to sit down with Dr. Kieran McLeod, a former emergency physician who made the leap from clinical work in South Africa to building startups in Australia. We first connected on LinkedIn, and this conversation reminded me just how powerful it is when physicians share their ideas publicly.

Kieran walks through his early career, how a failed plan to work on cruise ships turned into field hospital work with Doctors Without Borders, and how the rise of telehealth sparked his interest in startups. He shares what it was like to build his first venture, a smoking cessation app, with no coding experience and a lot of trial and error. We talk about low-code tools, product strategy, and the reality of building something valuable in a crowded space.

If you’re a physician wondering whether you can actually contribute in tech or startups, this episode makes the answer pretty clear. You can. And you should.

Episode Highlights:

[00:00] – How we met on LinkedIn

[04:40] – Emergency medicine, field hospitals, and a shift toward tech

[08:15] – Starting Baiguai (and learning the hard way)

[16:20] – Building without knowing how to code

[27:40] – Moving to Australia to go all-in on health tech

[33:50] – Why clinicians matter in product, ops, and safety

Transcript

Welcome back to Startup Physicians. This is your host, Dr. Alison Curfman, and I am excited to be joined today by an international guest, Dr. Kieran McLeod. He is joining us from Melbourne, Australia. Hey Kieran, thanks for joining us.

Dr Kieran McLeod (00:32.482)
Hey, Alison, thank you so much for having me on the show. Again, thank you for accommodating me at the tail end of your day. It's bright and early, eight o'clock in the morning here in Melbourne. But yeah, lovely to be on the show and yeah, very excited just to...

talk about my experiences in the startup world. I think there are a lot of clinicians out there who are very interested in the space and yeah, very keen to share some experience about how to make that jump from from clinical work into the startup world.

Alison Curfman (01:05.065)
Well, I'll start with a little story and it kind of demonstrates some of the things that I teach doctors, which is that what makes you stand out is that you reach out and Ironically the way that you and I connected was on LinkedIn I'm always telling people it is probably the very best platform for connecting with companies and startups and other people that are doing interesting things in the healthcare space, but

There are several people that I follow who are thought leaders on LinkedIn and I literally just saw you responding on multiple posts and I was like, hey, I like that guy. He says good things. And so I think I just messaged you on LinkedIn.

Dr Kieran McLeod (01:49.154)
Yeah, no, I think that was pretty much exactly it. And I mean, I honestly couldn't agree more. I remember joining LinkedIn back in, it must've been maybe 2020 or 2021. And of course all of my friends who were in, you know, commerce or were already working in tech were deep in the LinkedIn game by that stage. I thought, my God, I'm starting from like, you know, 10 followers. I'm never going to be able to build it up, but.

Again, like any social media platform, right? The more you engage, the more you connect with people, the more you kind of share your experiences, the more people are interested in, you know, connecting with you and kind of talking to you. And then you end up being able to connect with people like yourself where, you know, I get to hear your story, you get to hear a bit of mine. And we both get to learn a little bit more about clinicians who've managed to like make the jump away from hospital work.

Alison Curfman (02:45.149)
Yeah, and it's funny when I reached out, didn't even know you were international. I just, had a lot of connections in common and I find it very funny. I've been connecting with like a lot of people in Australia lately. It's like all these people are coming into my life that it's like, where are you from? even like I was at a hotel pool on two separate occasions recently and everyone at the pool was from Australia. So I don't know, the universe is trying to tell me something.

Dr Kieran McLeod (03:11.79)
The Aussies do tend to make their way around the world and I do think they're that one kind of group of people where if you bump into them, no matter where you are, they tend to be quite friendly folks. I me being South African originally, we tend to be quite friendly folks as well, but I think the Australians take it to a new level. That said, I also think that they are one of the few countries in the world that are

also making quite a big splash in the world of health tech. I think between the US, the UK, Canada to an extent as well, like they're the ones that seem to be making waves around the world at the moment with kind of building innovative technology. And so it's nice to kind of be part of a cohort that are, that's contributing to this kind of next stage of development in health tech.

Alison Curfman (04:05.031)
Yes, and I'm sure people are hearing your accent and you're mentioning that you're from South Africa. Every time I've talked to you, I've thought like I'm talking to Trevor Noah's, which is kind of funny because you sound just like him.

Dr Kieran McLeod (04:18.093)
I mean, look, I wish I was as funny as Trevor. I might have to watch a few more of his shows just to pick up on a few of his jokes. But yeah, he's definitely one of our best exports. And I know he's certainly well loved across the pond in the States. So glad that I could be compared to someone like Trevor.

Alison Curfman (04:37.295)
Yeah. So tell me a little bit about your medical career and journey. I can't remember if you trained in South Africa or if you trained in Australia.

Dr Kieran McLeod (04:47.553)
No, no, so I trained in South Africa. So I finished med school back in 2016. And essentially after you finished med school in South Africa, you do like an internship for two years and then a year of community service. And during that time, I kind of felt that...

Emergency medicine was the kind of realm that I wanted to play in. It was exciting, kind of adrenaline-fueled, and I was like, ah, yes, this is what I think I should do for the rest of my life. And then I finished CommServe in 2019, and my kind of goal for 2020 was to jump on a cruise ship and go be an emergency doctor on a cruise ship. And as I'm sure I don't need to tell you,

2020 was not a great year to be on a cruise ship. So I managed to avoid that sinking ship. And so, you know, given that there was a global pandemic, I decided to kind of jump into field hospital work. So I joined Doctors Without Borders and I worked for them for just under a year, moving around South Africa and assisting in field hospitals to...

Alison Curfman (05:34.217)
No.

Dr Kieran McLeod (06:00.12)
basically helped during like the major waves that came through South Africa. And it was really during that time that I saw this kind of rise of telehealth and I figured, ooh, this is exciting. I want to be a part of this health tech journey. And that's what I think kind of initially sparked my interest to sort of start exploring a career outside of clinical work.

Alison Curfman (06:26.013)
Yeah, so what did that look like for you? So you said you maybe started with some advisory roles or how did that come up?

Dr Kieran McLeod (06:34.165)
Yeah, so interestingly, the first opportunity came from just being social and talking to people. I went off to a braai, which is what we call a barbecue in South Africa, and chatted to someone there who was working in the kind of online men's health clinic space. And at the time, they were looking into helping young men.

like myself, who were experiencing hair loss, get access to different types of medications that might help to slow their hair loss or help them regrow. So I said to them at the time, like, I'm very keen to help you out. I probably won't be your best salesperson, but more than happy to share some wisdom on how to use things like minoxidil, various other medications that might help to slow hair loss.

And so that really just became like something quite, you know, casual. was, hey, can you see a couple of patients for us? Can you help us figure out like what the sort of right treatment model is for this? And so I did that for a few months. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out. I wanted to join them, but we couldn't quite figure out what the right sort of working relationship was. And I, at the time, very much still wanted to do clinical work.

And so I carried on doing clinical work and emergency medicine for a little while and then eventually thought, maybe I can give the startup thing a go. Like I want to build something myself. How hard can it be to build a business? And again, I'm sure I don't need to tell you this, but it turns out building a business can actually be quite hard. So yeah, so at that point I basically embarked on this journey to build Baigua.

Alison Curfman (08:17.747)
yes it can!

Dr Kieran McLeod (08:26.145)
which is basically a smoking cessation app. For those of you in the States or abroad, a guai is a South African slang term for a cigarette. that was kind of the origin of that name. So that was really kind of my first real step away from healthcare was founding that business and basically figuring out like, okay, how are going to build this product? Like we have an idea, how are we actually going to take this from zero to one and...

basically do all of the things that building a business requires, which is a lot more than building a product, which is what I didn't really realize at the time.

Alison Curfman (09:05.651)
Yeah, because I actually talk to a lot of physicians who have a vision about something that could change healthcare in their field. And a lot of them don't quite know what would I even do with this idea because there's so much around building the operations and structure around something that I've heard the quote that no business ever dies for lack of vision, it's for lack of execution. And so there's just so many...

Dr Kieran McLeod (09:33.037)
Absolutely.

Alison Curfman (09:34.867)
details and so many things that need to be working in concert together for a business to work. Even amongst the best ideas, sometimes businesses sometimes can be something that isn't sustainable. And so it's a lot of different talents that need to come together to make that work.

Dr Kieran McLeod (09:55.128)
Completely. mean, I think one of the best kind of things that I think it was my dad who shared with me is, know, strategy is not just having, you know, the best idea. It's actually deciding or just having, you know, all of the ideas. It's actually deciding about what not to do because you only have so many hours in a day. You only have, you know, so many people that you're working with and

Alison Curfman (10:13.065)
Hmm.

Dr Kieran McLeod (10:19.211)
Yes, you may have this vision of like, you want to build this incredible product or service or offering, but...

In order to do so, you basically have to figure out what am I going to do today that is going to help me get one step closer to what I want to achieve tomorrow. And often that's very hard, especially in the early days when there are a million different things to do and you're like, my God, my head is spinning. How do I decide what to work on? And that was very much the case with Baiguai because I had a co-founder, she was still working full time elsewhere.

She was non-technical and so a lot of the product building ended up falling to me. Now, again, coming from a clinical background, no idea how to code. I was like, I don't know how to build a product. can't afford to outsource this completely. What am I going to do? And so early on it was very much just, okay, what do I need to do today to get one step closer to being able to build this product? And that's pretty much how the journey began.

Alison Curfman (11:23.081)
Did you put any, did you have any like support around you? Like I know my first venture was in more of a venture studio type environment. Some people will bring on like a technical partner. What, what was your approach?

Dr Kieran McLeod (11:38.158)
So when we started off, we were quite lucky in that we had someone who'd kind of agreed to be our CTO at the time. And granted his focus was very much in sort of data science. He was not an app builder. And so he gave a bit of direction on, you know, what we should be building. Unfortunately, he decided a couple of weeks in that actually this wasn't quite the right thing for him to sink his time into and actually he was going to step back.

And yeah, we were completely bootstrapped. So it wasn't like we had, I guess, a venture partner or like a venture studio that we were working with. I was quite lucky in that I had quite a few friends who worked in tech who could give a lot of advice on like, this is how you can build an MVP or a minimum viable product. And basically pointed me towards using these sort of low code, no code tools that could help to

essentially build the first iteration of your app. And that is really what kind of sent me down the tech rabbit hole in many ways was learning about these tools, figuring out how to connect them all together, occasionally leaning on a friend who might know just that little bit more about a particular tool that I don't know that much about, and then kind of using that as a way to kind of bridge.

the gaps in my knowledge and move yet another step forward. And that is effectively how we built Spy Riot was very much using these low code tools and connecting them up with one another in order to build websites, the mobile app, and then kind of all of the operational systems behind the scenes as well. And that I think was probably the thing that like,

really kind of catapulted me away from clinical and like into the startup and tech world was figuring out that, okay, yeah, medicine is hard. Like there's no doubt about that. And there's a lot of knowledge that's been acquired during that time. But if I can learn to do the basics of this tech thing, you know, then pretty much anyone can, and I should, you know, capitalize on this momentum and

Dr Kieran McLeod (13:59.86)
start building that technology more and more. And I think that's essentially the reason how I managed to get myself very firmly in health tech now. I mean, I don't see a return to clinical medicine happening anytime in the future. And is exactly what I say pretty much to everyone in clinical work who's keen to get into tech is like, you know, just just build something. It doesn't matter what it is, just just show me that you're interested in that you're capable. And that's going to

tell me a lot more than just saying that you're interested in working in tech.

Alison Curfman (14:35.465)
Three things came to mind while you're talking about it. One, what set you apart is that you actually did something. All these people have ideas, but you're like, you know what, I'm gonna try it. I think that is not a quality that everybody has. A lot of people think a lot time about something, but don't ever act on it. And so that really stands out to me, because it's very much a...

It's this mindset of like, everything is figure out a bowl. Like you could just keep looking for answers and tap into your network and learn new skills. And, the second thing that came to mind when you were talking is that, it's so interesting that building product is actually not. So much about like the technical skills, so much more of it is about strategy. Cause I mean, you could be a developer and you could just code and code and code and code. They would code anything you ask them to, but

when you're trying to make a really good product, especially a clinical product, it's so much about like the strategic direction of like, what do you want it to be able to do? Like what is the outcome that you want? And it's not just like put a button here. It's, you know, how are we going to influence behavior and real clinical impact through technology? And so I think it sounds like you've got a ton of product development experience. And then the last thing that I thought of while you were talking about like,

low code, no code solutions and not being a developer by background is that like the native language of AI is English. And it's the first like tool that uses an actual native language of English as opposed to like coding language, which makes it so profoundly accessible to everyone. And it does make it that there's like the explosion of people that are like making their own agents and apps.

Dr Kieran McLeod (16:10.74)
Exactly.

Alison Curfman (16:28.745)
and trying to build a whole business out of that, which that's its own discussion about how you create something that's truly valuable and not just like a very tiny point solution. I don't know, I'm curious to hear your reflections on that, like just actually doing something and the strategy behind product development and then how many options there are now for developing stuff with AI.

Dr Kieran McLeod (16:54.189)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, three great points. I mean, I think the first one about, I guess, having an idea and then following through with it and kind of committing to it. A little bit of it was, I guess, the fact that, I sort of brought on, you know, a co-founder as well. So I had someone else who I was sort of accountable to. And at that stage, I'd sort of, I guess, made the call to build in public, not necessarily

you know, actually telling people what components or features I was building every day, but more to saying, I'm building this thing. And in many ways that kind of created this, I guess you'd call it contracts with myself where I was like, well, I've told people I'm doing this now. I don't want to be the guy that.

Alison Curfman (17:43.005)
You gotta hold yourself accountable, yeah.

Dr Kieran McLeod (17:45.294)
Absolutely. And again, you know, 10, 10 years of studying medicine and then working in medicine, I'm like, I'm not someone who likes to fail. So therefore I'm going to just keep going at this thing. It turns out failure is actually not a bad thing. It took me a few of those to figure that part out and I'll touch on that in a little bit. But yeah, I think that was, that was really the reason why I kind of doubled down. I was like, look, I've told people I'm building this thing.

I'm going to just continue building it. To touch on the second point around, you know, the product is not everything and that so much of it depends on again, strategy, you know, who your market is. Again, selling, marketing, how you actually, you know, get your product into the hands of people and not just, you know, have them sign up, but actually engage with it and get the desired outcome.

which in my case was to get them to quit smoking. And I think probably one of the hardest lessons I learned during, you know, the, I guess, early stages and actually over the whole run of Baiguai is that I actually think I picked the wrong market. I wanted to help people quit smoking, but I was building a B2C product and I'm sure I don't need to tell you, but B2C products are incredibly hard to...

to build, to sell, and it means that, you know, your customer, you know, the amount that you're making per customer is relatively small. You're having to spend a lot of money just on advertising, just to actually get them on board. And then they engage for a day or two and then they drop off. And so a lot of the learning that happened along the way was like, damn, I've chosen to build this in this way. I actually think I need to pivot my offering to

actually sell to businesses to help their employees quit smoking rather than try sell directly to the consumer. And that actually is what pushed me into using LinkedIn more because suddenly I was like, I shouldn't be doing Facebook ads. Let's jump on LinkedIn. And then that is kind of a nice tie back to what we were talking back about in the beginning. So yeah, so that was definitely some of the learnings that I had about, you know, product and strategy early on.

Alison Curfman (19:49.864)
Yeah.

Alison Curfman (20:01.351)
Yeah.

Alison Curfman (20:08.061)
Well, I actually support a number of companies that have taken that same route where it's like, sometimes you start with a direct to consumer approach to at least like test it out, get, cause it's easier to get, you know, some random person to pay like $9 for an app or something than to get an enterprise contract for like a population of people. But it is very hard for a company to scale in just a direct to consumer way. So anyone who's out there trying to build

direct consumer company, especially a healthcare company, really needs to be looking ahead to their story. How do I actually get this into the hands of like, know, multi thousands of people per contract as opposed to like, you paid $9, you're committed for a month, and that might be it. So it seems like that was a learning experience.

Dr Kieran McLeod (20:52.896)
Exactly.

Dr Kieran McLeod (20:56.607)
Yeah. And maybe just to, sorry, to answer your third question, cause that was the one I didn't get to around as kind of no code and low codes. And I think you're right. Like now code is, no longer the language of, of building, right? It's, it's English. And back when I started building, Baigua and again, other products that I've kind of built along the way.

Alison Curfman (21:01.332)
yeah.

Dr Kieran McLeod (21:23.309)
The reason why I chose these kind of low code no code tools is because look it it feels much easier to use something that's visual where you can build the interface in front of you, you know I want this button to lead me to there and I wanted to send this data to this database and it just made so much sense to me to build visually because again so much in medicine is

visual, right? We see a patient in front of us, we make observations there, it's much easier to then say, okay, I can make better decisions if I know what this action is going to do. But I think what really helped there is that kind of no code is a gateway to code, because there are limitations in these products. And then suddenly you realize, I need some way to connect this to that.

And then you start going online and at the time it was going to sub stack and figuring out like, okay, how do I do this specific thing? I just need one little snippet of code to do that. And then the first time you managed to implement that tiny little snippet of code, you're like, oh my God, I'm an engineer. I mean, not really, but you know what I mean? So that was kind of the pathway there. And I think in the current age, like there's no reason why someone like shouldn't be building or should be like afraid of building.

because the barrier to entry is so low. Like you can go and download a cursor, a windsurf, even just, you know, Claude or chat GPT and get something basic going. mean, there are many apps out there who are essentially dedicated to just helping people vibe code products. But the real challenge is exactly what you mentioned is building something that actually scales and that people want to use. And that's where I think a lot of the learnings come in.

beyond just the product, it's how do I make sure that my product is built and suited for the market that I want to serve.

Alison Curfman (23:24.655)
And you, guarantee you didn't know any of that stuff when you started this first venture. And that's what's so interesting about the journey is like, there was so much that you were probably like, yeah, I'm sure I could figure that out. And it was probably way harder than you thought it was gonna be. There were probably times that you weren't making any money and you were like, my gosh, I can't get people more than just like these $9 or however much you were charging. And the way you got better,

Dr Kieran McLeod (23:45.357)
You

Alison Curfman (23:54.269)
was to pivot and to learn. now that you solidified a lot of skill sets and pattern recognition that you're like, that's definitely not the way to do things. And next time you're not going to do it that way. And so I think that a lot of doctors feel like there's this huge barrier to entry of this world of tech and startups that they're just like, I just don't know anything about it. I kind of feel like

both you and I, like neither of us knew anything about it either. And you just kind of like figure it out. And then as soon as you figure it out, you have a new skillset, right?

Dr Kieran McLeod (24:26.571)
Yeah. And yeah, I think that that is the thing is that I think because it feels so foreign to like medicine where again, you are taught probably the same content that, you know, the previous generation of doctors or nurses, physios, or whoever was taught. it feels like everyone's speaking very much the same language.

And so you talk about something, talk about a concept, you go into hospital and ED award, like, you know, everyone knows what they're talking about because you have this, the shared jargon. And then you start hearing all of these, this different jargon coming from tech or from, from business. And you're like, this is intimidating because I hear these words, but I don't know what they mean. And therefore I don't know how to bridge my knowledge, which is all of this clinical.

stuff into the world of business or the world of tech. The thing I tell everyone is like, look, a medical degree has actually just taught you how to think, it's taught you how to solve problems and problems need to be solved in every business. If anything, that's what they do. A product or a business is there to solve a problem, a pain point for someone. And often clinicians just need to be reminded that

that's actually the skill set that they have been taught. It may have been a very niche problem solving skill set, but that's not to say that they can't learn to solve problems in a different area. Much like how you would have started out maybe just kind of doing, you know, general medicine and then gone into pediatrics and learned about all of these like kind of niche problems that pediatricians deal with.

you can move into technology and learn about the problems that technologists deal with or tech companies deal with. And I think that the first step there is really just, I guess, a bit of immersion. And that's often getting onto LinkedIn. It's connecting with people who are doing the work that you are doing or want to do or the field that you want to work in and starting to see like, what are some of the activities that they are?

Alison Curfman (26:21.181)
Yeah.

Dr Kieran McLeod (26:44.333)
getting up to what are the products that are being built. And then probably the next part is actually just a bit of like basic education to upskill. And I think, I mean, you're obviously doing a great job in like actually building out an education platform for clinicians who are interested in kind of like making the jump because that is probably the first stepping stone is just, okay, I need to acquire some knowledge that helps me better understand.

where I'm going and the industry that I'm about to become a part of.

Alison Curfman (27:16.841)
Yeah. And I sincerely hope that this podcast and sharing it on LinkedIn, it enrolls a bunch of Australians into my course because I would just love that. It'd be so cool. But I'm curious to know, so after that first startup experience, you built all these skills, you developed all these like tech and ops and sales and all of the things. did that take you? What was your next step?

Dr Kieran McLeod (27:41.934)
So yeah, so I think after building Baiguai for a couple of years and at the same time I was still kind of doing locum work in the emergency department just to make sure that money was coming through the door because you got to eat at the end of the day. I realized that trying to do night shifts and weekend shifts in the emergency department while running the startup and building a product.

was probably not the best thing for my overall health and work life balance. Yeah. Again, another hard lesson to learn, no doubt. Anyway, at that point I kind of realized, okay, I'm really enjoying this health tech thing. I actually, I want to go all in on it. I want to stop doing the clinical work so that I can just focus on like building this health tech career because I don't think it's...

Alison Curfman (28:12.969)
I've done that myself, so I've been there.

Dr Kieran McLeod (28:35.181)
sustainable to continue working in the emergency department as well as building a product in the startup. And so at that point I started kind of looking for opportunities in health tech and I was very lucky to be connected with a few people including Tom who was the founder of Heidi. He was another clinician also kind of building health tech products.

the stage, he was halfway around the world in Australia while I was in South Africa. And I saw an opportunity to join them as a medical AI resident was the name of the role. And I was like, that sounds pretty interesting and cool. And it's something that I could probably do. And so that began a series of conversations with Tom and some of the other people in the Heidi team. I was very lucky that another one of the kind of

product managers or head of product at the time was a fellow South African doctor. So I had kind of a connection in that sense. Anyway, one thing led to another and eventually they said, look, we'd love to have you on board, but we need you to move across to Australia. Like we're all based here. You know, this is where our headquarters is. This is where all of the actions happening. And I just don't think it will work if you stick in South Africa. And so I thought, okay.

I've got nothing to lose. I'm not married, no kids, you know, why not go on an adventure to Australia? And so I moved over here in September, 2023. I'd been working for Heidi for a few weeks at that stage. And essentially it got to the point where we had about five different products at the time and none of them really had any sort of product market fit, making a bit of money, but.

You know, we were a venture backed business. We really need to get something that worked. And within the first couple of weeks of me being here, I started building this AI scribe. And that really resonated with our first few users that we introduced it to. They could see the value in having, you know, an AI listening to the conversation between them and their patients.

Dr Kieran McLeod (30:59.501)
and writing their notes for them without them having to, you know, type for click more than a few buttons. I think documentation is a massive burden for every clinician. think the stats are something like 50 % of our time is spent on documentation, which is not what we trained for. We did not train to be typists or data capturers. We were trained to heal. And that basically

Alison Curfman (31:22.055)
Right.

Dr Kieran McLeod (31:27.913)
spark to shift in the company where essentially we sunset some of our other products to focus wholly on this described product. And from there, it's really taken off. And with it, my remit's changed quite a bit. again, as head of medical knowledge, it's a very broad term, but essentially we cover everything from product to operations to clinical safety to regulatory work.

which is very broad, again, that's just the nature of the business.

Alison Curfman (32:02.897)
And is your business mainly in Australia or are you guys international?

Dr Kieran McLeod (32:07.805)
So we're international. Again, Australia is still probably the market where we have the most users. It's obviously where we started off, but we have a reasonable footprint in the US, quite a reasonable footprint in Canada and the UK. I think the US has probably more competition than most other markets. know, they're big players like...

a bridge and you know Dragon Copilot from Microsoft, Ambience, a number of other scribes over there which makes it lot harder to compete. But we've had an epic of course.

Alison Curfman (32:34.216)
Yep.

Alison Curfman (32:43.249)
an epic, epic introducing their own new tool that might put everyone out of business, but.

Dr Kieran McLeod (32:48.517)
Yeah, I was gonna say that that that that's like one of the ultimate competitors, right?

Alison Curfman (32:53.733)
Yeah, right? They have the perfect distribution mechanism.

Dr Kieran McLeod (32:56.301)
Absolutely. so yeah, so we are operating internationally. We found some markets, we've had a much greater like hold on the market. So in the UK, for example, something like 50 % of doctors that are using Scribes or 50 % of GPs that are using Scribes are using Heidi. So, you know, that is, you know, a massive, you know, amount of market share there, whereas, you know, in the US it's probably a smaller amount, but again,

many more sort of doctors there and a much larger population to care for.

Alison Curfman (33:30.313)
curious to know, this position, how do feel like your medical knowledge is translating? Because first and foremost, you're trained as a doctor. I think that you have such an interesting career path. And I would like to think that you're really infusing this clinical quality and knowledge into a space that really needs that perspective.

Dr Kieran McLeod (33:52.524)
Well, yeah, I mean, I think in many ways, and I think, you know, this is maybe where I can maybe shed a bit of light on like the kind of work that clinicians may end up doing in a business. And I'll talk just about my own team, just to give insight there, but I'll try and touch on some of the, you know, the many points of value that a clinician can have in a tech business. So as I mentioned, we cover sort of a mixture of product operations and then kind of clinical safety, regulatory work.

On the product front, remember we're building products that are being used by clinicians. And so if you give a, I guess a problem to an engineer and you just describe it kind of in the way that a clinician describes it, they may not end up building it in the way that is intuitive for a clinician to use or have, I guess, the features that a clinician would expect from something like that.

And there are a couple of like ones which I can touch on here. So one of the things we did when we first built the scribe was to give clinicians the ability to add nonverbal context. So not just transcript equals note or transcript turned into transformed into note, but also realizing that sometimes clinicians want to add information that they don't necessarily say out loud. know, obvious example is psychiatry.

You know, if you've got a patient in front of you who's, you know, showing signs of psychosis or you're concerned about, you know, they're, that they might be harming themselves or something like that. That's not necessarily something you are going to verbalize to the patient in front of you. You want to just jot down those notes quickly, but you still want it to be incorporated into your note. Same thing with maybe a referral letter from another clinician who's given you some lab results or other findings like

I don't want to have to read out that letter to make sure that it makes its way into the note. If you'd given the problem of, want to turn conversation into medical note to an engineer, they may just say, cool, speech to text model, transform medical note. And they may have missed out on that kind of important aspect. So having the clinician there to just add that extra context for lack of a better term, helped to actually shape the product in such a way that

Dr Kieran McLeod (36:19.199)
it actually becomes far more intuitive for clinician to use. And they feel like, this is actually built for me. It's not just like an engineer has built it and slapped a healthcare label on it. So that's really, think that the value, particularly on the product front, on the AI side of things, a lot of our work comes down to prompt engineering. So essentially helping to guide these large language models to do the things that they're supposed to.

Alison Curfman (36:32.988)
Yeah.

Dr Kieran McLeod (36:48.115)
and then working with the engineers to make sure that we've chosen the best models. And a lot of that is to do with making sure that we've captured the right amount of detail and we're ensuring that we don't have hallucinations popping up and understanding which hallucinations are really problematic, i.e. making up diagnoses and management plans is very much a no-no. So that's really, I think, the value that clinicians can play on the product side of things.

When it comes to operations, like there's a million different things that clinicians can do there. But I think from our side, it's often actually helping users troubleshoot when they do have issues with their sessions. So they may report, there's something wrong in the physical exams section. I didn't say this or didn't mention this medication. You know, when we're reviewing that

we can go in and actually figure out like, the reason that this came through is because of something that was said in the transcript, which resulted in that link. And if you just have someone who doesn't have that kind of medical context, they may not pick up on that is the reason why that particular data point came through. So yeah, so that's kind of product and operations. And then I think clinical safety kind of speaks for itself. Like, you know,

Alison Curfman (38:13.106)
Yeah.

Dr Kieran McLeod (38:15.253)
Nobody wants to release or have a product out there that has the potential to cause harm to patients in any way. Again, know, Hippocratic oath first do no harm, right? So, you know, from the get go, like making sure that whatever we build and put out there is not going to harm the patients that we're looking after, ends up being an integral part of it. And so that often helps to shape

Again, product design, how it actually gets built, and ultimately ends up being quite important for certain markets where the expectation is that you have that kind of clinical safety framework and governance in place that kind of helps people, particularly like large enterprises, understand that what you've built

is not just like a fly-by-night operation, like it's actually something that someone is consciously reviewing all the time to ensure that we are using the most high quality models, that you know we aren't having regular incidents where people are being harmed because nobody wants to end up on the news because they didn't actually do their homework right.

Alison Curfman (39:33.669)
yeah. I mean, I feel like most companies that I've worked with or started, it's like, how do we not, not cause a problem? And yes, you're right. Nobody wants to be on the news for that sort of thing. Well, I think that your journey has been so interesting and has led you around the world, total different career path than you probably expected originally. And I think it's been really cool to hear all the skills that you've gained along the way, because now you're like,

You have a very marketable skill set. have so many different experiences that have turned into, I don't know, I tell people that like even like you didn't used to know how to put in a central line and somebody you saw one and then you did one and then you taught one. So just continuing to gain skills in the direction that you want your career to grow. And even if you're part of a company that ends up not succeeding,

Dr Kieran McLeod (40:19.426)
Yeah.

Alison Curfman (40:30.311)
Like you still gain the skills, you gain the network, you gain the experience and you're onto the next thing. And that's not at all to say that I don't think your company is going to succeed. It's just, I have been in part of things that didn't launch or didn't take off. And everything that I took with me from that chapter of my life led to the next thing. So I really appreciate hearing all the twists and turns that you've taken along the way.

Dr Kieran McLeod (40:57.514)
Yeah, appreciate it. And yeah, it's nice to just be able to, again, chat with someone who's kind of taken the path less traveled because I think most clinicians feel like, you know, the safety net is working in the, you know, the job that they were trained for and that they studied for and often may not realize how much value that they can actually add, you know, working on the system rather than in the system. And yeah, I think my sort of, you know,

piece of advice for anyone that's interested in exploring a career outside of medicine or outside of clinical work is to A, just go and talk to people who have made that jump, figure out what are they actually doing? Is the work that they're doing appealing to me? And then go and learn a lot more about what does that work actually entail? So that you know what you're getting into and you're not just making the jump into the dark.

And yeah, as I mentioned before, I think the first step is once you've met people is to go and just learn a bit more, you know, whether it's doing these kind of like mini courses to kind of upskill in different areas, like that's very much like a great first step. And then once you've kind of got that idea of like, okay, this is the area that I want to work in. I want to work in product. I want to work in ops. I want to work in governance or safety to then go and I guess like

work on a project that is related to that, even if it just means like putting your hand up and saying, Hey, I'm keen to just like come on board and learn, offer some supports in some way. Or like take the initiative yourself. If you want to do product, actually just go and like build stuff. Anyway, it's been great chatting to you, Alison. And I really appreciate you having me on the podcast. It's been a lot of fun.

Alison Curfman (42:49.455)
Yes, thank you so much. And if anyone wants to connect with him, Dr. Kieran McLeod, we'll put his LinkedIn in the show notes. And yes, I'm just very glad that we were able to randomly connect on LinkedIn. And for anyone that is interested in reaching out to random people on LinkedIn, you might make a friend halfway around the world. So thank you again for joining us.

Dr Kieran McLeod (43:16.298)
Magic, Alison. Thanks to you for having me and yeah, nice to chat to you.

Alison Curfman (43:22.121)
All right, so I hope to see you guys next time.