HaroonAhmad

I was diagnosed with severe eczema two weeks after I was born.

My childhood was dominated by flare-ups every few days and immunosuppressive medicines that often had little or no effect. Regular appointments with dermatologists showed me what medicine could do, and inspired me to pursue it as a career.

I got into medical school and trained to become a doctor.

The reality was different from what I expected. A consultation captures the flare or problem in front of you. But it rarely shows the weeks at home before it including what changed, what a person tried and what made things worse. Time pressure makes that context difficult to collect, so the immediate problem is treated while the root cause often remains unclear.

Sadly, the trend in the NHS was that these time pressures were becoming ever increasing.

I completed a Management BSc at Imperial College London with first-class honours. The course covered entrepreneurship, marketing and accounting, and Imperial encouraged careers beyond medicine in a way I had not seen elsewhere.

I also pitched at Imperial Enterprise Lab competitions. The degree gave me the commercial foundation for my move into digital health.

I joined the Academic Foundation Programme and continued the leadership work I had started at university. My project examined leadership and innovation inside the NHS, including work with local Academic Health Science Networks.

During the same period I joined the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme and started building the foundations of EczemaDoc with my co-founders Dr Niall Jawad and Dr Noreen Akram.

My experience with eczema led me to co-found Eczemadoc, a tool for tracking symptoms, discovering possible triggers and managing flare-ups at home. It was released on the App Store and Google Play, then renamed Proton Health and expanded to acne and psoriasis.

The current product is Symphony. It combines photos, symptoms, lifestyle, mental wellbeing, diet and products in a 360° assessment, then looks for patterns and prepares a personalised plan. It supports people with eczema, acne, psoriasis, rosacea and other persistent skin concerns.

I had spent years on strong immunosuppressive medicines. Tracking my symptoms in the Proton Health app found triggers that treatment alone had missed.

Two months of tracking linked strawberries, other berries and apples to my symptoms. I also switched my shampoo after finding an irritant ingredient, started using Adex Gel for its Niacinamide and trialled a handheld red-light device from Amare Skin. My last flare was in summer 2023.

Adult social care loses roughly one in four workers each year. My time in the NHS taught me what can go wrong when staff aren’t treated well, and in the care sector the situation is just as difficult, if not more so. That level of turnover damages morale and makes continuity of care hard to maintain.

We joined Visiting Angels, an organisation built around carer-centricity, and took on two locations in Cheshire East and Kirklees & Calderdale. We pay the highest rates in the area, pay for travel time, employ carers directly and provide three days of face-to-face training, followed by shadowing, supervision and observed practice. Turnover within Visiting Angels was about 9% over a 12-month period, compared with 23.1% across adult social care in England. That means clients are more likely to keep the same carer, choose who cares for them and receive complex care reliably.

Most productivity tools organise tasks, but none of them reduce the cognitive load of actually doing the work. Aftertone combines time blocking with a focused execution screen built around that problem.

Auto Plan and Auto Schedule build a full week automatically. Voice Mode and fast task capture get work into the system in seconds, and the calendar updates itself as plans change. It is live now on Mac, iPhone and Android.

I build practical systems across healthcare, care, research and operations—usually where a workflow is too slow, fragmented or difficult to audit.

These are selected examples of how I frame the problem, build the system and measure whether it works.

I am currently looking closely at continual compliance in care. Important evidence is often assembled around fixed checkpoints, which creates bursts of work and leaves problems harder to see between reviews.

I think the better model is continuous: capture evidence during normal work, identify gaps early and keep people focused on the care itself. That is one of the systems I want to build next.