I was so enthused and inspired when I entered the Bayes Centre at University of Edinburgh for our Oracle sponsored OneHealthTech event and was welcomed by the Robotarium!

It couldn’t have been a better venue for hosting our joint event, ‘Building Your Dream Career in HealthTech’, I could practically taste and smell the talent and intellect of the entrepreneurs who’re on a mission to enhance the interactions amongst robots, people, environments and autonomous systems.

So, it was a real privilege for Oracle to sponsor One HealthTech Scotland’s latest event – Building Your Dream Career in HealthTech – last night with a panel of HealthTech entrepreneurs and experts sharing their personal journey’s, experiences and thoughts on how they ‘got on’ in the health sector.

As many people who work within the health sector know, there are clearly defined clinical career pathways within the sector, however, understanding how to start, or progress, a technology-based HealthTech career can be a pretty-daunting task.

Having recently joined Oracle after an enjoyable career in my previous company spanning many years, I had the pleasure of opening the event and sharing my recent personal recruitment and on-boarding journey - wow how the recruitment process has changed! My top takeaway - I gained good insight and a sense of a company’s culture, values and what it would be like to actually work there by how they supported, engaged and interacted with me before I went for an interview – really fascinating.

I was pleased to be joined by one of Oracle’s resident emerging tech enthusiasts Stafford Burt, Principle Solutions Consultant. Stafford gave us a slightly different take on the use of technology in Healthcare. He explored the role of AI and Machine Learning and how data and analytics can help organisations make positive decisions when retaining or recruiting today’s diverse workforce. Do you know the relevance, and difference, between the white circle & blue wheelchair, or the blue circle & white wheelchair symbols on the London Tube Map? No? Well we do, thanks to Stafford!

Our keynote speaker, Christopher Wroath, Director of Digital – NHS Education for Scotland, took us on a thoroughly entertaining tour of his impressive 35-year public sector technology career. From the challenge of installing networking infrastructure on HMS Belfast (you can’t really drill through steel designed to withstand missile attacks, can you?), through to working at Number 10, and onto his current role where he’s transforming a disparate and complex information landscape into a single unified environment. Christopher passionately believes that adapting to the changing world of technology is about retooling, not reskilling, and that engaging with digital development is about the role you play, not the job you do.

So, what if you want a career in HealthTech but not physically within NHS Scotland? Or you have an inspirational idea that could really shake up the industry and transform the way care is delivered? Meet our final two speakers Debbie Wake, CEO – MyWay Digital Health and Claudia Freigang, Director – Hearing Diagnostics Ltd who shared their learned experiences of setting up their own companies to do exactly that.

Debbie talked about her remarkable journey from producing the first medical podcast in the UK that reached an audience of 1,000,000 as a TV doctor, to joining the ‘dark side’ by founding a private company providing the only diabetes self-management platform in the world – truly fabulous. Are you an avid entrepreneur who’d like to walk in Debbie’s footsteps? Debbie’s top tip - technology is the key to achieving impact at scale, so embrace it.

Claudia gave a very useful and honest account of the key challenges small innovative HealthTech start-ups face when establishing and running a company, and that also having a commercial background is also a key ingredient for success. This is an extremely relevant topic for anyone looking to make the move into HealthTech. Now, well established and making great headway into NHS Scotland, Hearing Diagnostics Limited aims to bring about earlier diagnosis of hearing loss by improving the efficacy of screening technology. Claudia’s presentation also emphasised the importance of establishing and leveraging a network of key people as they can help you open doors, and she made specific mention of the amazing networking opportunities available at One HealthTech Scotland events!

All in all, I found this event truly informative, thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining evening and would like to send my deepest thanks and gratitude to all our wonderful speakers, and to the One HealthTech Scotland volunteers, and all my team who made this event the undoubted success it was.

Until the next time!