Serial entrepreneur Dr Khan Mohammad Siddiqui describes himself as someone who dreams big and is always on the lookout for new ventures. In his candid and self-deprecating style, Dr Siddiqui adds that his wife (also an AKU alumni who is a successful radiologist) views his liking for novelty in a much less glamorous light. She quips that he’s just someone who is easily bored and comes up with a new interest every few years.
Throughout his career, Dr Siddiqui, a graduate of AKU’s Medical College i
n 1996, has channeled this restless spirit into a range of innovations spanning fields such as medical imaging, informatics (the science of data processing) and human-computer interaction (the study of how humans interact with computer technology).
His efforts to fuse his medical expertise and knowledge of computer science with his passion for problem solving has led to him achieving unusual success as an academic, as a senior executive at Microsoft and as the founder of a range of companies. He is currently working as the chief technology officer at Higi, a healthcare startup he co-founded in 2012, which makes it easy and convenient for patients to monitor their health.
Dr Siddiqui - who holds eleven patents - believes that innovation occurs at the edge of one’s knowledge. This conviction means that he’s always searching for novel ways to tackle healthcare challenges.
In this interview, Dr Siddiqui shares valuable lessons about the process of innovation, his interest in computers, his memories of AKU and how he’s applied his medical knowledge in unexpected ways.
Q. How did you first become interested in computers and IT?
In fifth grade I was given an amazing present. It was an early model of a computer, a Sinclair ZX Spectrum that ran on Sinclair BASIC, a precursor to Microsoft DOS or Windows! Back then, I was fascinated by the computer but I soon got bored with it when I learned that the computer had no games. So, I picked up a book on how to code games in BASIC and developed my own versions of Hangman, Tic Tac Toe and Pong.
That was my first try at software development and I was hooked after that. I continued to take computer classes alongside my studies and as people started to notice that I was good with machines, I started getting approached to solve a very varied range of problems.
Q. What was the first problem you solved?
The first software product I developed was for my mother when I was 12 years old. At the time, she was a professor in gynaecology at Liaquat University, Hyderabad, and every year my sisters and I would help her tabulate final results for the annual exams in obstetrics and gynaecology.
There were around 500 students and it was time consuming calculating all the results, arranging them for each student, tabulating them and ranking them to be eventually hand written on official university paper. The year before, my sisters and I did it by handbut it was such a difficult exercise that I thought that I needed to find another way.
So, I put together a very basic data entry programme on Lotus 123, a spreadsheet software popular in the late 1980s. The programme would add up all the results for us and make the results easy to print.
It turned out that people loved the system and in a few months my room was full of sealed envelopes with results that I had to print! I later turned this into a full-blown exam management system that started to be used by various departments and other universities. It was really satisfying to see my system being applied in a big institution.
Q. You started your MBBS degree at AKU in 1990. Were you always studying during your degree or were you more interested in extra-curriculars?
I wasn’t a particularly great student but I was involved in a lot of projects. I loved every bit of life at AKU and so I got myself involved in a range of initiatives that the faculty were working on.
One of the first people to have an impact on me was Dr. H R Ahmed, a physiologist. He was conducting a study into how changes in the settings of a treadmill, like the incline, affected a person’s calorie burn. I was 17 years old then and I used my previous knowledge of mathematics to determine how adjustments to the equipment affected the benefits of exercise.
Another project in the field of basic science saw my colleagues and I evaluate the links between autonomous control of blood pressure and the disease, pre-eclampsia. This required me to record the blood pressure of women at varying stages of their pregnancy and in different positions (for example standing up after a period of rest). Both projects deepened my understanding of the body’s vital signs and how changes in one’s immediate environment can impact a person’s health.
Looking back, the time I spent in basic medical research gave me a deeper understanding of the power of information in understanding disease and in predicting the onset of illness. Moreover, the research gave me a deep appreciation of the concerns of people with these diseases which made it easy for me to understand how technology needed to be designed for patients. And 22 years later, I incorporated the lessons I learned from these projects into my startup, Higi.
Q. Tell us more about Higi and why you feel it’s important?
The vision of Higi is to help transform the way communities take care of themselves. We do this by capturing data from a wide variety of sources, wearable sensors as well as our self-service biometric stations into our cloud platform. We then make this information available for patients via our mobile app or website and for doctors via integration into their healthcare applications.
We launched Higi in March 2012 and we now have over 40 million patients on our platform who use it to stay informed about their health and to share developments with people they trust. Every day we collect data from 85 different types of healthcare monitoring devices and applications, customer loyalty programmes in large retailers, and through higi stations (self-service biometric kiosks) placed in over 11,000 pharmacies in the US and soon 1,700 pharmacies in Canada.
Importantly, we also measure and track all this data in an anonymous way in real time. This enables our data science teams to turn all this information into amazing insights which tell us where the biggest healthcare problems are. For example, our data tells us that most cases of uncontrolled hypertension, a very common problem in the US, are concentrated in just twenty large urban areas in America. Such information is very useful for policymakers and can have a huge impact on public health initiatives.
Q. What other projects are you proud of and how did you develop those ideas?
When I was working in radiology at the University of Maryland and VA Maryland Healthcare System, we came across a problem of mismatch between CAT-scan orders by doctors and what was imaged. For example, a doctor would order a CAT-scan of certain regions of the body but sometimes the scan would include additional areas of the body to answer the clinical question but this additional imaging was not captured in the order or report. In other cases, the incorrect labelling of CAT-scans caused problems in billing patients correctly.
I started to think if we could get a computer to recognise organs in a scan and to automate medical records that would improve the administrative processes for doctors and hospital staff. So, when I joined Microsoft, I led the development of a machine learning system that would teach a computer to recognise if radiology images included specific organs. So, I used my knowledge of the body’s anatomy to develop this technology that would enable a computer to recognise organs just like a doctor or radiologist would.
Slowly and gradually we honed the algorithm to the point where the computer could recognise human anatomy on CAT-scans. At the time, we were only thinking of the numerous applications of this technology in radiology.
But that changed when we were approached by another group in Microsoft working on a secret project codenamed Project Natal. They had a similar objective of getting computers to recognise parts of the body and so they sent us a few images to check if our algorithms could detect the human body parts in these images. More specifically, if we could detect hands, feet and elbows.
The technology we developed could solve their problem and we later found out that Project Natal was used in Microsoft’s motion-sensor based gaming console, the Xbox Kinect, which has sold over 24 million units to date.
I went on to head the imaging division at Microsoft and I worked there for 4 years before I left to start Higi.
Q. You hear words like innovation and entrepreneurship in conferences and on the television all the time. You’ve started six companies and hold a number of patents, what do innovation and entrepreneurship mean to you?
Innovation and entrepreneurship are essentially about solving problems. People usually think of innovation as being like a light bulb that goes off in your head which leads to you forming a company. It’s never been like that for me.
All the ventures or ideas I’ve been involved in are a result of a lot of small steps based on my past experiences and interactions. I don’t think that a great, innovative idea has ever come to me out of the blue. In my experience, interesting ideas that I’ve developed into businesses have come to me after a long struggle to solve a problem and often while I was doing something completely different!
Over time these ideas evolve into something big like a technology company, a medical device or an innovative process. I don’t believe that entrepreneurship or innovation are pre-determined, linear processes and that’s something that holds true in my experience in both medicine and software.
Q. What advice would you give to young students who want to do something innovative?
Always dream big and be willing to try new things. I find many young people complain about doing certain tasks that they feel are insignificant. I can relate to that feeling as I used to think that some of the projects I did at AKU were mundane and a waste of my time; but the hard work I put in then helped me understand things that I could execute on 15 years later.
So, I’d like people reading this to remember that nothing is insignificant. Whatever you learn and whoever you interact with is important. Your experiences today will influence your future in ways you cannot imagine. So, keep trying and keep learning and if you come against an obstacle, don’t worry. Move on and try something new as you learn the most valuable things through struggle.