Shez Partovi

The neuroradiologist turned executive predicts that Al will transform the NHS, with huge benefits for patients and clinicians, he tells Julia Kollewe

- Julia Kollewe

Two decades ago, Shez Partovi was working as a neuroradiologist at the US private hospital chain Dignity Health in Arizona, and remembers listening to a lecture by a nun between seeing his VIP patients. Sister Margaret was talking about children with diabetes on Native American reservations just 50 miles from the hospital, who had little or no access to medical care.

Partovi, now chief innovation and strategy officer at the Dutch healthcare company Philips, recalls: "She said: 'I want you to remember there are people that are born, live and die never having seen a physician, and your job is to know that."

It made him think: "Is that the rest of my career, to see four patients a day? How do I scale whatever impact I want to have?"

He enjoyed working with patients - he still dreams about angiography, a type of X-ray used to check blood vessels. "My wife thinks I'm nuts, but it helps me ... I am grounded in both the patient impact and the physician plight." But he wanted a job where he could reach more people.

So Partovi, who has postgraduate qualifications in computer science, became chief digital officer at Dignity, where he worked for 20 years, and then moved to Seattle to run Amazon Web Services' business development for healthcare, life sciences, genomics and medical devices. Fast forward, and the Iranian-born Canadian has been working at Philips in Amsterdam for the last four years, overseeing development of MRI and CT scanners, and image-guided therapy that uses light to navigate blood vessels, all powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

AI-enabled scanners and other devices will benefit patients, as well as clinicians, bringing relief to overstretched health systems such as the NHS, he argues, speaking from a radiology congress in Vienna.