In this conversation, Alex Ng -President of Tencent Healthcare- shares his unique journey into healthcare, highlighting the importance of understanding public health and societal factors. He discusses the role of AI in healthcare, emphasizing its potential to empower patients and improve efficiency. Alex also reflects on the human element in healthcare, the challenges of misinformation, and the cultural differences in healthcare adoption. He draws from his experiences at McKinsey and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, advocating for a lifelong learning approach in the rapidly evolving healthcare landscape.

 

Chapters

Journey into Healthcare: A Personal Story | 00:00

Understanding Public Health and Societal Factors | 06:20

AI in Healthcare: Opportunities and Challenges | 10:24

The Role of AI in Patient Empowerment | 16:42

Human Element in Healthcare: The Role of Doctors | 20:25

Insights From McKinsey and Global Health Organizations | 24:55

Combating Misinformation in Healthcare | 29:05

Cultural Differences in Healthcare Adoption | 34:56

The Importance of Lifelong Learning | 42:05

 

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Expert Profile:

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Transcript

Journey Into Healthcare: A Personal Story

FMAI: Alright, so Alex do you want to just give me a little bit of an introduction on yourself, why you decided to get into healthcare, a little bit about your journey, your study, just give me a little bit of insight into who you are.

Alex Ng: Right now, my role is I’m the president of Tencent Healthcare, Tencent is a big tech company and there’s a big healthcare component so I’m now leading their venture into healthcare for the past five years now.

Now if you ask me when I first moved to healthcare then you have to go back to my high school days, it’s the first vocation after high school, what you want to do, and for the longest time I want to be a doctor.

I think that was partly influenced by how my family doctor treated me and my family, and that’s sort of like my role model, what I wanted to do.

And so I think in the early days it was quite simple, you get the match, you go to medical school, you get through medical school, you go through training, but I think I took a very very different journey compared to pretty much all of my classmates.

Because all my classmates then, they would go through the training program, become a specialist, some stayed in New Zealand, a lot of them Australia, quite a few of them are actually in the UK.

There’s a cardiologist here, there’s a neurosurgeon here, they’re my classmates.

But I think they choose different specialties, they will move to different places, but they are still very much either in clinical or in research, still in the medical field.

I don’t think many has taken the route that I’ve taken where I sort of gone off the rails, so to speak, compared to all of them.

I mean there was a strong reason why, because the sense that I want to do something beyond clinical medicine started off when I was in medical school.

And in our finding with medical school, we have these medical electives.

We basically choose to go to any place on earth to do whatever we want.

As long as we can justify it, this is relevant to our medical training.

It’s really to open your eyes.

Some say, “Oh, I want to be a great cardiology researcher,” right, then they might go to Cleveland Clinic, right?

That’s what some of my friends did.

Well, I said, “Look, I really want to actually understand public health and how societal factors affect health beyond health and disease.”

And so as part of that, I actually went and worked with the Flying Doctors of Australia.

So I was actually based out of a very, very small town, I think 200-odd kilometers east of Broken Hill, Caldwell, Kenya.

I’m not sure whether you’ve heard of it.

It’s a town where it’s a strip of road in the middle of nowhere with a hospital, with a petrol station/post office/grocery store, and a pub, right?

And you look after Aboriginals, mainly 90% Aboriginal population.

And you do fly-in, fly-out to do medical evacuation.

And I think this is where I got a sense that no matter how great medicine is, most of the health status of these people are predetermined by where they live, who they are, how they grow up.

And by the time I get to them, so to speak, there’s very, very little I can do.

Then it gave me more of the conviction that, look, maybe I want to do public health.

But I also got mentored, saying, “Look, before you go and become a public health field specialist, you should understand what clinical medicine is, because otherwise you will be not down to earth making policy that doesn’t work on the front line.”

So I took that too hard.

And then I did my fair share of clinical training.

Then I studied for the Master of Public Health.

But rather than studying in Australasia, I went to the US and studied there, because I also wanted to get a very, very different perspective of different health systems.

I grew up in a very Commonwealth-based health system, right?

Government-funded.

But I know that across on the other side of the world, it’s literally 100% privately funded.

Where, just by statistics, they’re not really doing a very good job, right?

They spent 15 to 18% of GDP, depending on which year you look at it, with very, very bad health outcome.

And that got me curious.

It’s like, how come the United States being touted as the most developed, most advanced country in the world, spending the most amount of dollars within healthcare and get very, very different in return?

That’s what I wanted to study.

That’s why I chose to do my Masters over there.

So I can start comparing contrasts, right?

And understand whether there are certain root causes of why that has happened.

But then, I mean, I guess the rest is history.

Once I went there, I never really quite returned back to New Zealand to finish all my training that I had planned.

 

Understanding Public Health and Societal Factors

FMAI: Yeah, I mean, it sounds like you realised very early on the disparity between regional and metro settings with healthcare, but also just the differences in different countries, because it is so different, isn’t it?

Alex Ng: Yeah, and healthcare, people like to think that, well, while healthcare is very local, right?

There are drugs and medicines and devices and AI.

They have more, I would say, commonality, I guess, as is the human race, right?

If we have a mutation, my mutation is the same as mutation, then we need the same drug.

But the delivery of healthcare is so contextual, it’s so cultural.

There’s a lot of traditional element to it.

There’s a lot of societal element to it.

And we can see that with the development, even with the technology, that we understand us so much more, right?

But it seems that we can’t really change how we get healthcare beyond the area and the community in which we live in.

 

FMAI: And so Tencent, it’s kind of diversified from being an internet kind of company into moving into this healthcare space.

Why don’t you tell me what sort of sparked your interest in the application of AI in healthcare more generally since you’ve been at Tencent?

 

Alex Ng: Yeah, well, I think this, the first, I guess, why I wanted to do it is when I was at the Bill and Melide Gates Foundation, right?

So I was tasked with the Health and Innovation portfolio, right?

What can we do to actually solve some of the toughest and I would say the most unseen healthcare issues from around the world, right?

Where this is development of a drug for malaria, where this is development of TB vaccines, right?

How do you actually make it work in the poorest places on earth, right?

Whether it’s in Africa or India or rural China, right?

How that would apply to the what we call the bottom of the bottom of the of the population pyramid.

And it was then that I started to realize that one approach, of course, right, is to develop the drugs and vaccines, right?

The other one, how do you get it to the people?

But then when you look at the people, it’s not that they don’t understand.

It’s also about the access.

It’s all about the understanding.

But then it’s also about a lot of the health care workers actually don’t have the tools, right, to actually support the population or flip at the other end.

People talk about patient centric care, like patient centric care model.

But in a way, it’s still a bit paternalistic when you think about it, right?

It’s about how can you actually get the tools in the hand of the people to help them help themselves?

Because by all equations, whether you look at the current trouble NHS is facing or even in China, there will never be ever enough doctors for the demand of health care, especially when the population is aging.

People are not making more babies to become future doctors.

And the same is true for China as part of the core of my speech on Wednesday at the conference is that no matter where you cut it, the supply and demand equation will never be fulfilled by training more people.

And then how can we develop tools?

One, to me, is a little bit of a bandage solution to help the doctors and nurses become more, quote unquote, efficient.

Basically, ask them in the 24 hours that they have, deal with more.

But to me, this is about trying to stand at the bottom of the waterfall with your bucket held above your head, trying to stop the waterfall from flowing.

It’s never going to happen.

You need to go way upstream to damn the damn thing.

And the only way to damn it is to have tools for the population to look after themselves or to be even more pragmatic. For the parents to manage the kids and their parents’ health more.

And I think this is where when I have the discussion with Tencent and I think the mission is quite aligned.

Tencent is a big tech company, but it also has a big mission on social responsibility, on how can we use the platform that we have, whether it’s actually the Tencent platform or the WeChat platform, actually start making meaningful change in health care.

One of them is about health literacy.

 

AI in Healthcare: Opportunities and Challenges

How can we make sure that we get the right health care information that is scientific and not prone to being manipulated by social media as misinformation?

And so we first started off saying that it’s not even AI.

So let’s get the information out there.

Let’s work with WebMD.

Let’s work with Healthwise to start bringing some of the more legitimate, I would say rigorous content to China.

And then on top of that, users are actually, when you give it to them, they actually really want to know more about the health care.

Then we start incrementally developing tools so that they can self-manage their health.

For example, we have developed a little AI for mothers to chart the growth of the baby rather than having a paper A4 chart.

I’m a boy, I’m a girl.

This is the line you’re supposed to grow.

We have it all in the app, right, in the mini app, right, where you just enter how tall you are, how tall you are, will this be on a certain range?

Then we have actually the right information to tell you, right?

It doesn’t mean that your kid is too short or too tall.

It depends on first your parents’ height, right, and then the nutritional status.

If you go beyond this, these are the things that you have to watch out for.

And then at the right time, you have to consult your doctors, right?

And we develop tools for mothers to track their periods, to track their fertility if they want to have babies. This is all pure online.

And when they need to go offline, like to see a doctor, to see a, to go to a hospital, this is where we start also better to develop what we call infrastructure tools, right?

A healthcare ID so that you can, when you go to different hospitals and clinics, they know who you are rather than on one clinic I’m called Alex and the other clinic I’m called Alex Ng and they don’t talk to each other.

Maybe NHS is much better, right?

In the UK as a unified system, but a lot of places around the world, it’s not so easy to be known as the same person across healthcare institutions or payment.

How can you make sure that when you go to a hospital, like you don’t have to pay out of pocket first because you have healthcare insurance?

But I think China is now known for the digital payment, digital currency.

We literally brought the same thing to healthcare insurance.

Where when an end user go to a hospital and they have their own public health insurance, literally scan, paid.

And if they say, well, you need 20 RMB co-pay, Tencent pay, authorised, done, you walk out the door, right?

There’s no reimbursement, no claiming.

And now we’re actually working with commercial insurance so that they can also use the same back end technology.

And I think now for certain commercial insurance that we’re working with, so after you’ve seen a doctor, you already pay half of that portion of your bill with the public insurance and the rest you’re supposed to give it to the commercial insurance for reimbursement.

If its for outpatient, you can get that reimbursement in three minutes.

I think this is the power of technology.

No longer do you have to scan, fill in forms, post it in, someone calling you, hey, I can’t read your handwriting.

Can you see me the receipt?

Oh, I’ve lost the receipt.

Then we can’t give you reimbursement, right?

Now everything is driven by technology.

Even in an inpatient one, we managed to get down in the pilot phase the reimbursement time from seven days to three hours.

I think this is where everything I’ve just talked about, I haven’t even touched AI yet.

There’s so much more we can do to minimize sort of the pain of healthcare, right?

Even without talking about AI, this is me to me, something I used to say to my team a lot.

We hear buzzwords a lot.

We hear blockchain.

We hear IoT.

We hear digital.

We hear AI.

We hear gen AI.

We hear cyber security.

We hear everything that you heard about.

I say, look, my philosophy is only use the technology where it makes sense.

At Tencent, I think we are very privileged.

We are standing on the shoulder of giants.

I don’t need to go out and fundraise and tell a glory story to venture capitalists.

I don’t need to sell.

The only person I need to sell to is our founders.

And luckily for me, our founders have such a big heart.

And it’s not a plug, right?

Today is actually 9th of September.

Today is our annual charity day where everybody today we’re supposed to do charitable services at Tencent.

And not only do we do charity ourselves, we actually use our platform to help NGOs fundraise, right?

And no better way to do it than on the platform that Tencent has, right?

All we’re about is actually how do we use our platform for good.

And that’s all in our mission, right?

How do we actually use provide value for our users and use technology for good?

And this is just one of the side plug, right?

It’s like this is the day where we think we can actually help the society so much more than just by donating our money, but by using our platform to make sure that NGOs projects get heard, finding partners that they can actually match with, right?

And also provide an opportunity for employees, right, to actually spend a day giving back to the community.

 

FMAI: That’s good, Alex.

And I guess what you were saying before is not even touching on AI technology, sort of connecting the dots with healthcare, fast tracking it, making it easier.

I guess, do you think AI could sort of empower patients a little bit more, give them control of their data?

How do you think AI is sort of fitting into this and complementing the tech?

 

The Role of AI in Patient Empowerment

Alex Ng: AI is going to make my life of developing a solution or product so much easier.

Everything I just talked about is sort of like general technology.

But I think now AI, especially with the sort of latest couple of years, right, with generative AI, is that it allows us to do a lot more processing and analytics that is personalized to the person rather than everybody fed through a rule base or a very, very narrow specific AI model.

And I think now the AI is getting to a stage where it can actually ingest a lot more information and background to give more personalized and automated advice.

But I think the flip side of the coin, which a lot of people discuss, right, there’s still a hallucination, how to control it, what are the risks involved?

And I think those are still very valid that we focus on.

But I think everything I just sort of talked about, rather than let me go back to the growth chart example.

Like our previous model two years ago will be your sense tracking sort of below two standard deviation, right.

It’s not growing as expected compared to the parent’s height.

Then you can imagine that if the user wants to find out more information about growth, retardation or stunting or things like that, then there will be lots and lots of articles about it.

But now you could actually be a lot more personalized in the delivery of the same content to the person.

Now, why I think that is actually quite instrumental is rather than just reading a piece of article that is written, which will stand the test of time about stunting, about growth, retardation.

Yes, people can read it, can understand it.

But if now the AI can help paraphrase the medical information in a way that relates to you as a person, the chance of you internalizing it and taking appropriate action to it is going to be so much better.

And I think similar research actually has been done for the longest time, right.

We all know smoking is bad.

I think Australia and New Zealand, we have these packaging that is gruesome, right, on those cigarette packages, right.

Has it really stopped people from smoking?

Not really.

But there are so many research to say that, well, one of the more impactful reasons why somebody might choose to smoking is a doctor actually tell them you have to stop smoking.

Yes, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it  actually works more often than not, right.

Because it’s coming from a position authority relating to your current health status.

Give me the opportunity to say, you’ve got to stop smoking, right.

Let me help you with this.

And I think AI actually has this similar idea because you feel like someone is taking sort of your concern, your problem, your questions into concern and talking to you rather than having a news article somewhere that talks about. Stunting or smoking or a hazard of smoking.

So that to me, I think is the emotional side of change that AI can bring to health care.

But then knowing that there’s still a lot of safeguard and guardrails we need to put in place to make sure it’s used appropriately to predict the confidentiality.

But that to me is the potential that I see.

 

FMAI: So I could, I guess, yeah, help drive home key messaging from doctors and have that emotional element. And on that, I think there is a little bit of fear towards AI from some patients or just the general population. There’s a bit of fear that it could replace doctors. I’m sure you’ve heard this kind of talk before. What’s your stance on this when patients have a bit of apprehension towards it?

 

Human Element in Healthcare: The Role of Doctors

Alex Ng: I think one from a technological perspective, I don’t think any AI has the knowledge of a doctor yet.

Even though all the big tech companies like to put out their out their model, manage to pass the exam, the medical exam with a certain grades.

So when you go to see a doctor, do you want to trust a fresh graduate out of medical school or you want to trust somebody 45 years or 20 years experience?

I think this is still a heavy human element to it.

I think from a question answer point of view, AI is great.

But to me, it’s always going to be a tool is how the medical community, not just doctors, right?

Nurses, how the patient uses tool to the advantage.

But this, I think one thing that I think AI cannot replace is why I say health care is all about not just about health.

Everything we just talked about is about health.

This also the care element.

I think this also the care element where as a doctor, I can read your body language.

I can ask questions that you feel you’re uncomfortable with, but you’re glad that I asked those questions.

For example, domestic abuse, like some of those questions or some of the mental health related.

You just you will not voluntarily want to do it, but you’re glad that somebody actually can see through it and ask you about it.

I think this is where the human element of medical health care professionals will be very, very hard to replace by technology.

Now, now I probably be staying corrected 20 years from now because I also think that the way that different generation communicates is also changed.

I’m old school, right?

I still talk to people in person if I can meet them in person in person.

But if you look at the teenagers and the kids growing up now, they’re much more comfortable conversing with someone on an app, over the phone, through email.

They seem to somehow get the same emotional bonding with the other person through digital communication.

That’s why I would say I’ll stay corrected in 20 years time.

Maybe in 20 years time, you know, I need to see the doctor.

Maybe you don’t actually society as a whole don’t feel like that the whole human interaction to touch on the shoulder when you want to cry.

It’s as important maybe as an emoji.

On the app.

I think this is just something that I don’t currently understand myself because I’m a very different generation.

But maybe in 20 years time, people can get the same level of emotional support through a digital interaction.

And if that digital interaction is being provided by the AI.

Like, I could see it logically coming to that end.

But I think this is not something dictated by medicine.

I think this is something is a societal question rather than something way to the health care.

I think health care is only going to be riding on the same wave of change that we see on how humans interact and say and but then you can get the emotional response. You can get the you can get the comfort. And yet they still need to sometimes take a drug. You need to have a surgery. I don’t foresee that being an automated service at any time being.

But I do see that it’s more important thing about how we use AI to actually help us along the entire sort of spectrum of the patient journey.

AI will be very helpful in supporting doctors and diagnosis in supporting us to click information that we don’t have.

Even in robotic surgery, sometimes we need AI to make it more precise or mixed reality to tell us that, oh, this is a scan. This is a cancer. We need to cut so that cut more. So we have a safety margin.

Those are the things that I think AI is absolutely like transformational that no other technology can provide.

And that those are the things that we should just full on embrace.

But some of the AI that we just talked about is I think we need to be aware of the risk.

We need to be aware of the governance.

We need to be aware of all the things that we need to care about.

I think the adoption of which is actually driven by society, not just by health care.

It’ll be interesting to see, as you said, how emotional support is replaced with technology if it works.

So, yeah, that’ll be interesting to see how that.

We see that with those robots now, those silicon based robots. They are quite lifelike.

 

Insights From McKinsey and Global Health Organizations

FMAI: So I believe you spent almost a decade at McKinsey, the McKinsey company.

And what did you learn from your time there?

And how do you think that’s been able to sort of carry forward your career in advancing AI and medicine?

What did you learn from those past experiences?

 

Alex Ng: Well, I first learned that at McKinsey that how the business world works.

That’s something that a doctor from New Zealand would not be very, sort of comfortable with at the beginning.

How do you actually read a financial statement?

Why are there different companies formed this way?

What is a shareholder?

I think it’s just some basic business fundamentals, right, which I actually learned quite a lot.

But I also actually learned how to structure my thinking and communication in a way that helps me ingest and understand new topics very, very quickly, but without being an expert in it, because I think the problem solving skills that I got trained in throughout my tenure at McKinsey was something that’s really invaluable.

And I would say that it’s very similar to being in medicine.

Medicine is about collecting information, figuring out who you are, trying to find diagnosis, giving you a solution.

That’s very much what a management consulting does.

But then they do it on a company level, on a health system level, on a government level, where at the end of the day, you’re just problem solving for a different entity.

And I think this is where I took away the most, right?

But then I also really appreciated my tenure at McKinsey, where I truly can just do what I enjoy, right?

And in that way, we have a phrasing called “You make your own McKinsey” in a way that you find and work in areas that is more meaningful to you.

So I get to work for different pharmaceutical companies to understand how they operate, how they develop new drugs.

I work with health systems in the U.S. and in Asia, right, on tackling some of the public health reform issues that they have.

I work with the health tech companies, right, on why is it so hard to develop a good electronic medical record, right?

And for the longest time, right, I also worked with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when I was at McKinsey, right, on how to actually tackle some of the toughest public health problems, right?

And so the transition to the foundation for me was very seamless.

And I think that, to me, was one of the most invaluable experiences together with my medical training, because I can now see both sides of a very different world that I grew up in, and in some ways, being facetious, right?

The world I grew up in is different from how the world operates.

And how the world operates is economy, is governments, is based on companies, is based on investments, right, is based on policy.

So the things that being a frontline doctor, you don’t actually get a lot of exposure to.

And I think that’s the exposure that I took away the most from my 90s there.

 

Combating Misinformation in Healthcare

FMAI: And from your experience in that, I mean, that’s amazing that you did learn those skills there. And then it looks like you’ve used them in a very cool position with the WHO. And this Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as well.

Talk to me a little bit about that, because I think there was a big focus on the pandemic there, tackling misinformation, which you’ve already mentioned as well.

Talk to me a little bit about these two roles, because that’s a really influential position.

 

Alex Ng: The WHO role is more of an advisory role, right, rather than a job job.

And that was first actually established before COVID.

So the first meeting that we had was about how can we create standards for digital health, for health care, where there’s actually terminology standard, interoperability, like saying things that people from a policy level that countries should have alignment on.

And but then the the second meeting we got was right after COVID.

And then at the beginning of it was about sharing what everybody else is doing and the digital tools that you use to sort of like live with or manage COVID.

I think for the longest time, I was like, I was also privileged because I was in China.

This is where COVID first blew up.

So I had to quickly mobilize my team early in 2020, right, to develop a lot of we literally was building a plane as we’re flying it.

Different health information tools, data dashboard, push it to the public, which city has how many cases, how to define a case, how to define mortality.

Like these are the people are so hungry for information at a time.

But at the same time, I remember I wrote an op ed early in 2020 with the director general of WHO, right.

Tetros at that time, really about misinformation, right.

The first op ed when WHO reached out to me and said, look, I can talk about the AI tools, the WeChat tools. But to me, I just want to spread the word that is coming, whether we like it or not.

Let’s just put it out there and let everybody know that the biggest battle we pray of the fight is going to be misinformation.

It’s going to be misinformation about the disease, misinformation about the treatment, misinformation about the vaccine leading to vaccine hesitancy.

I also spoke to this with Heidi Larson here at the School of Tropical Hygiene Medicine.

She’s one of the foremost experts on vaccine hesitancy.

Before COVID, people were already worried about vaccines and preventions.

I think with COVID, it’s just add oil on fire that people are mistrusting it even more.

And so for me, for me, there’s one part of the WHO is really about just sharing about more stories and experiences so that people from around the world can just learn from each other on what they work.

But I think gradually, as that mature, as the people sort of put COVID on back burner. So look, let’s focus back on the few key things.

How do we actually build a much more interoperable pipeline?

WHO, how foster innovation and digital health to, from policy perspective, because it’s not just sometimes not just about a startup or big tech company come up with an app.

Is that do they actually have a sustainable environment to plug that into? And if you don’t, that seedling will die.

How do you actually have a support structure around it?

So there was more of the WHO work, but I think that the Bill and Melinda Gates one was a, I would say one of a life exchanging experience in a way that because we keep working to tackle the problems in the areas where it doesn’t have a lot of resources.

So you see, I hate to say I think I benefit, I was very selfish in a way that I benefit a lot from the experiences that well, I learned how to be grateful with what I have.

Because there’s a lot of people just by the O’Varian lottery, did not have what they deserve. There’s a lot of potential that that could not be fostered.

Just back to my Kenya days. Like, just because you’re born there, like you’re it’s very hard to change your life course.

Same as if you’re born in the poorest country on earth, right. Without the health and nutrition and education. You will never be able to fulfill the potential.

And I think that the mission is that everybody has a have that equal opportunity to have a healthy and productive life that resonates a lot with me.

So it goes back to a lot of what I do now at Tencent to make sure that whatever we do, we have the end user in mind and how we can make sure that we broaden the access, how we can control the costs, how we can improve the quality of the services we deliver.

So that so that we can really just try and put a little dent right in in changing the health care system.

The health care system is very resilient and it’s very stubborn.

How we practice medicine hasn’t really changed in the last few hundred years.

Yes, this new technology, this new drug, this antibiotics, this AI.

But by nature, the model of care is still very much the same.

And but then I think this is why a lot of people in government is frustrated with it.

I mean, at least to say you guys here in the UK. You know, the NHS is great.

It’s a great asset, but you’re also frustrated with it every single day.

And you just wish that it can be better. And I think this is a little bit of my mindset.

Well, I don’t think any tech company, including Tencent, can be health care.

I think. But then, however, we have the tools to enable a different health care.

And I think this ultimately goes back to your question.

Will AI replace healthcare. No. But I think we can help co-create and shape a very different health care than by just leaving it to the health care institutions.

 

Cultural Differences in Healthcare Adoption

FMAI: I think it’ll be really interesting how governments harness AI to improve those systems as well.

We’ve already touched on sort of how AI is affecting health care.

Have you noticed any main differences in different countries?

Any comparisons, maybe even between China and the UK, for example?

And even if you wanted to, do you want to touch on your Bill Gates and Melinda Foundation 

 

Alex Ng: I can’t say compare, but I can show you sort of my experience of working this in China.

I think it’s just the insatiable need of the public is high.

And people understand the equation that if you go to see a doctor, you get two minutes, like the supply and demand.

It doesn’t quite work. So for them, they’re very willing to try things that might not be fully baked, might not be perfect.

But what they are also very used to is giving feedback.

So for when I launch a mini program about a certain function and services, right, we’ll get a lot of feedback from the user.

Hey, can you change this button? Hey, I don’t like this color. This look doesn’t look funny.

Some of them is about design choices. I can’t please everybody, but some of it is actually about functionality.

So we get she get a glimpse into how different users use the product, which is very different from a traditional way of doing it to do focus, script and survey and to design a product this way.

So we go for a very, very quick iteration, right?

Get feedback, make some changes, compare and contrast to see whether they like A or B and do A/B testing.

And then we go for A.

So for me, it’s an ongoing journey.

It’s never a product user. It’s a service and experience in general.

And I think they are and because of that, you see people are more accepting of “failures”.

Like they never expect anything to be perfect. As long as you can provide value to me, I will use it.

And I think that is sometimes the difference where you see certain new technology or new services being adopted in China so much quicker just by metric compared to the rest of the world.

Because I think just the pace of change, the willingness to embrace trying new things, I think just the mindset is slightly different.

And if it’s leading to the Gates Foundation, the Gates Foundation is also all about innovation.

But then the innovation to me is even harder because it’s about it’s the innovation that not a lot of people see.

The app that I have will be hundreds of millions of users.

But in Bill and Gates Foundation, when we when we when we try to tackle an issue, well, we try to tackle TB.

When was the last time you heard anyone around you with TB except when you need to go and apply for a visa for immigration?

They’ll ask you to have a history of TB.

But by and large, you don’t see it.

And that’s already one of the but then TB is one of the biggest killers in the world right now.

Same as malaria. Still HIV.

And that’s why it is a global fund for malaria, TB and HIV/AIDS, because that is still a huge burden, but just not a burden that we tend to see in the more developed country. I guess a middle to high middle income country.

And so for that, that’s why philanthropy has a very unique place.

Because if it wasn’t for the generosity of the Gates Foundation and Warren Buffett’s wealth, right, those issues would be very hard to address.

Who is going to fund drug development of a new malaria vaccine? No one is invested in doing it.

Who’s going to do it for a new antibiotic for TB? No one is going to be invested in doing it.

I mean, GSK here is a great partner.

There was a bedaquiline as the new antibiotic that came out.

But I don’t think that will happen without the Gates Foundation support. At the same time, without GSK being also a very socially minded company at the time with Andrew Witty, the CEO, right, to come together and let’s let’s make a big bet and do it.

And now we have a new antibiotic to thank for.

And so I think the more to me, Tencent is a much easier job compared to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s because that your gratification comes 20 years down the line.

You don’t get for me right now.

I get instant gratification from the numbers.

It’s a very different model.

All my former colleagues are my close friends.

And we still talk a lot and we still collaborate a lot because they also ask me, right.

Well, if they want to address a certain issue, let’s say in sub-Saharan Africa in spreading a digital tool, right.

How I would think about it if I’m back in the issues.

So I’m actually also privileged because I also understand the constraint.

But now I have this experience of running some of the largest health tech platforms.

So I try to actually at least I don’t think I would be expanding my services to Africa any day.

But what I can also tell them, I can share them how I developed this, how I can make it equitable, how I can broaden the access.

And they can literally use the same philosophy and use the same experience in supporting their partners in doing the same thing. Whether it is in Africa or India or Southeast Asia.

 

FMAI: I think that leads back to what you were saying as well about how society and culture is.

 

Alex Ng: Has to be local.

Give it in whether how far something’s adopted or not even.

And big tech entering into those spaces, we’re not going to be successful because guess what?

We’re going to like it because it sounds good. And in a year time we will withdraw because it doesn’t get the same numbers and traction that we have.

So it’s to me, I’m this one part of the reason why I’m speaking in Europe is people ask me, oh, when will you come here, Professor solution?

I don’t think I am.

But you can literally copy and paste what I did in spirit.

Take it and create own company. Take it into your society and develop this.

And a drug sometimes because it’s very globalized. A drug is a drug. Everybody around the same world takes a drug.

But I think a lot of the patient or public facing digital health solution is much better when someone who understand the society and somebody understand the culture is developing it.

Just I’m sure if you have an app here, this homegrown developed this in the UK, the user experience and user habit is different from the ones in India.

It’s different from the one in China.

It’s different from the one in Japan.

Everybody has their own quirks.

Somebody like green, somebody like blue, somebody like yellow.

Sometimes that matters and some color is taboo in some culture, while the same color is prosperous in another culture.

Those are the things that I can’t unify into one app that rules the world.

I don’t think that is the philosophy in health care.

Maybe in certain businesses you can, but I think for health care, local context is too important.

We’re all different.

 

The Importance of Lifelong Learning

FMAI: And just one final question for you.

Just want to know the best piece of advice you’ve received.

 

Alex Ng: Always be in a learning mode. For me is you might think that I know a lot, but usually I was the one that asked the most question because I don’t understand it.

When I first joined Tencent, yes, I had a little bit of background interest in computer science and technology, but I’m not the one writing code day in, day out.

I’m not the one asking, well, so how can you ensure that our app protects the patient privacy? How do encryption work?

It’s encryption truly.

I was actually asking the question with my head of development.

How do I know how you’ve encrypted with your AES256?

It’s truly sort of good. And he said, well, and then he’s trying to explain to you, if I try to use brute force to hack into what is encrypted, it will take you billions of years.

So it’s not worth it.

But then where’s the key?

Do you have the key?

I don’t have the key.

He was actually teaching me how encryption work because for me, the thing is that when I want to develop something for health care, people always jump to us about privacy, confidentiality.

How can we ensure that wherever we design has that by design in mind?

I did talk about people do a lot of developing when you’re trying to say for health care.

Maybe you need to take it a bit slower.

Make sure you protect that trust first.

So I think those are the things where I learn.

I think I think that is the probably the best advice that anybody can take because the world is changing too fast.

And what I’ve learned in high school and medical school is quite useless now in terms of facts.

And so if you’re always in a mode of learning, it will probably get you a bit further than compared to always relying on what you’ve learned before.

 

FMAI: Keep learning.

Thank you Alex.

Alex Ng: Thank you for the opportunity.

FMAI: Thank you for the great conversation.

Alex Ng: Thank you.