Dr Mahiben Maruthappu and his family are a shining example of the contributions of the Asian community towards NHS in the last 70 years. Not just as a doctor, but also as an innovator, Dr Mahiben is changing the face of our health system, perhaps with a hope of saving its future.
Popularly known as Ben among colleagues, he is the Co-founder of the NHS Innovation Accelerator, introducing ways to counter the most challenging issues our health service currently encounters. It has so far created innovations used by more than 1200 organisations across the NHS, saving lives and millions of pounds.
He is also the Founder and CEO of technology-enabled home care provider Cera, that uses artificial intelligence to tackle growing crisis around social care and has Sir Nick Clegg as the Chairman on its advisory board. Prior to that, Dr Mahiben was the youngest senior fellow to the Chief Executive of the NHS, Simon Stevens, advising on innovation and technology and also he published an academic paper, including what the NHS can learn from the mobile game Pokemon Go.
Ben, now 30, spent his childhood in the inner working of the NHS- both its triumphs and tragedies. His parents who were doctors too, arrived in London from Sri Lanka 35 years ago. His mother Jayalini, is a practicing geriatrician, while his father, Kumaraswamy was a surgeon specialising in hip. His sister currently works as an NHS doctor.
He was only 12, a student at Haberdasher's, a North London public school, when his father suffered a heart attack. He watched the heroic staff trying to save his father all night, but he unfortunately passed away. His sister was at University then, and mother became a single parent over night, it was a very challenging time for the family.
Dr Mahiben in an exclusive interview with The Sunday Telegraph, said, “We were very close and it was an emotional time.
“It definitely took me a while to appreciate what had happened and also to be able to move on. My sister was at university and my mother became a single parent in a short period of time, so it was very challenging for our family. Looking back, I think it is one of the moments in my life that encouraged me to have a greater role in health and the NHS.”
He went on to study medicine at Cambridge and Oxford, also spending an interim year at Harvard as a Kennedy Scholar. Already a growing entrepreneur who, formed the UK Medical Students’ Association, while still an undergraduate. It was his time on the campus when Facebook and Microsoft became popular, and it showed him what profound and untapped potential technology could play in healthcare.
After graduating in 2013, he spent a year at Ealing Hospital as a junior doctor before moving to work for NHS England. The following year, the idea for the innovation accelerator was thought of, and by 2015 it was up and running.
His another creation is a smartphone app for managing hypertension in pregnancy by enabling expectant mothers to keep tabs on their own blood pressure producing data which is, in turn, monitored by clinicians in real time. The app has produced average cost savings of £300 per patient per week, and halved the number of hospital appointments.
Dr Mahiben still sits on the programme board of the innovation accelerator and still practises as a junior doctor in North London. However, much of his energy is now focused on his homecare provider, Cera, which was jointly founded with Marek Sacha in 2016 and is currently expanding from the south east to Nottingham, Yorkshire and Manchester and, by the end of the year, Germany.
