For over 17 years, I’ve been part of the Patients Know Best (PKB) journey. My role as co-founder was born out of a shared vision with our CEO, Mohammad Al-Ubaydli. Having lived with a rare disease, Mohammad experienced firsthand a fundamental flaw in our healthcare system: patient data is trapped in silos.
I joined PKB because I believed in the mission to unite these fragmented records and put the patient at the centre. I saw the astonishing dysfunctionality of a system where a patient – even in a global hub of medical excellence like Cambridge – has to physically carry paper files between world-class hospitals just to share their own history. Mohammad’s mission became my own: to ensure this vision succeeds. For me, this isn’t just a job; it’s a vocation. It is, quite simply, the culmination of my life’s work.
In 2021, however, an accident transformed this professional mission into a personal one.
The Day Everything Went Black
In November 2021, I was driving through Cambridge at a modest 20mph when my world began to spin. My vision blurred into a kaleidoscopic double image. Before I could bring the car to a halt, everything went black. I woke up to a sea of green; I had driven straight into a bus that was heading in the other direction.
I was lucky. If I hadn’t hit that bus, I would have swerved onto the pavement, likely hitting pedestrians or cyclists. By a stroke of fortune, I crashed right outside Addenbrooke’s Hospital. Within minutes, I was being treated for Atrial Fibrillation (AF). My resting heart rate was 146 bpm; my heart’s electrical circuits were misfiring completely.
Bridging the Gap with Patient-Contributed Data
During the 11 months it took to stabilise my condition through cardiac ablations at Papworth Hospital, I realised that the ‘missing piece’ of the medical record isn’t just what the clinician writes inside their institution – it’s what happens in real time when the patient is at home, work or even on holiday.
My colleagues at PKB had bought me an Apple Watch, and it quickly became an essential monitoring tool. While waiting for surgery, I could monitor my heart in real-time. If my heart rate plummeted or I felt ectopic beats while sitting on the sofa, I could capture an ECG immediately.
The impact was eye-opening:
- Clinical Insight: My surgeon at Papworth specifically requested these ECGs. They provided a window into my heart’s behavior that hospital monitors – which only see you for a few minutes during a consultation – simply couldn’t capture.
- Self-Management: It brought me in tune with my own body. By measuring my vital signs, I could manage them. I learned to adjust my activity levels and even my sleep patterns based on what the data was telling me.
- The Power of Prevention: Most importantly, I saw the preventative potential. If I had owned that watch before my accident, I might have spotted the warning signs. Today, I use it to continuously check my stats, ensuring I never go into a similar crisis uninformed again.
Beyond the Silos
My experience highlighted a frustrating reality. Even though I was being treated by two hospitals situated literally next door to each other, the only way to move my records from one to the other was on paper. Furthermore, getting my watch data to my surgeon required manual emails; it wasn’t yet the structured, integrated data flow that we’ve built at PKB.
This is why I am more committed than ever to our mission. We aren’t just trying to move data between institutions; we are integrating the patient’s own data into the clinical record. Whether it’s monitoring AF to prevent an accident or managing sleep to improve general wellbeing, the data we generate ourselves is a vital part of the story.
When the patient is empowered with their own data, healthcare doesn’t just react to crises—it prevents them.