Acting CTO for a clinical-guidelines start-up

I acted as CTO for an early-stage digital health start-up, including for its fundraising, working on a product to codify NICE clinical guidelines into a structured, queryable form, so health professionals could more easily check they were following current best practice.

At the time, the sensible technical approach was to encode the guidelines carefully, by hand, into something software could reliably reason over. That is substantial, detailed work, and it was the right approach for the moment.

Then the first genuinely capable LLMs arrived, and it quickly became clear they could read and apply the guideline text directly, doing much of what we had set out to codify by hand. That changed the case for the product. The lesson I took from it is one I bring to every engagement: the right technical strategy depends on timing, and is worth honestly re-examining as the ground shifts. Sometimes the most valuable advice is that the landscape has changed.