PANEL 1 | Generative AI in health and healthcare, help or hindrance?

Speaker: Anna Dijkstra, Director of Innovation for Healthcare and life sciences, Microsoft

Anna Dijkstra is the Director of Innovation for Healthcare and Life sciences at Microsoft, where she works with organisations across EMEA to match digital technologies to clinical and operational challenges, with a particular focus on interoperability and AI. She has decades of experience delivering change and transformation in healthcare, from the front-line to system-wide reconfigurations, and in life sciences firms globally. Anna was a corporate strategy consultant for the early part of her career, and spent several years delivering strategy and policy in the NHS. Prior to joining Microsoft, Anna was a commercial director for a clinical AI company where she helped develop and commercialise CE-marked imaging AI algorithms.

Speaker: Pritesh Mistry, Fellow, policy team, The Kings Fund

Pritesh works in the policy team at The Kinds Fund where he focuses on how digital tools and technologies can improve health and care. He is particularly passionate about using evidence-based digital technology as an enabler to improve quality of care and outcomes while critically assessing buzzwords and technology as a silver bullet. Pritesh combines his understanding of technology with the broader picture of the essential ingredients needed for digital change to have an impact. This encompasses culture, unmet need, infrastructure, change management and knowledge all to improve quality, inequalities and outcomes.

Speaker: Anna Studman, Senior Researcher, Ada Lovelace Institute

Anna is a Senior Researcher at the Ada Lovelace Institute. Her work focuses on the impacts of data-driven systems and AI on healthcare, and the broader societal implications of changes in health technology. Anna has a background in journalism and research. Before joining the Ada Lovelace Institute she was a Senior Health Researcher/Writer at consumer group Which? where she helped shape the organisation’s consumer-facing response to the COVID-19 pandemic, led investigations into health inequalities and co-ordinated cross-organisational strategy on the protection of consumer data.  

Chair: Dr Miqdad Asaria, Assistant Professor, Department of Health Policy, LSE

Miqdad is a health economist with extensive experience in both academic and policy making settings. His research interests include health inequalities and health financing with a particular focus on the health systems in India and the UK. He currently holds a fellowship from The Health Foundation to investigate the contribution of austerity policies to racial and socioeconomic health inequalities, a grant from the MRC to investigate the impacts of early interventions on inequalities in health and well-being over the life-course, and a grant from the NIHR to develop methods for accounting for unmet needs in healthcare funding formulas. He employs methods from health econometrics, social epidemiology, micro-simulation modelling and cost-effectiveness analysis in his research.