Our Entrepreneurs: Rakay Khan
Welcome to #OurEntrepreneurs, a series where we meet our innovators and uncover what inspired them to create change. Today, we’re delighted to introduce Rakay Khan, joining us from Barts Health NHS Trust.
Tell us a bit about yourself
I am a doctor working in critical care transfer and retrieval at Barts Health, with a background in anaesthetics and acute care. My day‑to‑day work involves moving the sickest patients between hospitals, often under significant time pressure and in environments where having the right clinical information quickly is not a convenience but an absolute necessity.
Name: Rakay Khan, NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Cohort 10
Occupation: Transfer Doctor, ACCESS Critical Care Transfer and Retrieval Service
That clinical experience is the foundation of the innovation I am developing. I have seen firsthand what happens when clinicians cannot access guideline information rapidly, and more importantly, what happens when AI tools provide confident answers that are not grounded in verified sources. That combination of clinical background and direct exposure to the problem is what motivated me to build something designed to address it.
Tell us about your innovation
TrustGuide is a clinical safety layer for AI‑retrieved guideline information, built specifically for high‑acuity environments such as intensive care, anaesthetics, and emergency medicine. It enables clinicians to query local and national NHS guidelines in natural language and receive answers that have been validated against the original source material before being displayed.
The core innovation is not the retrieval itself, but the validation layer that sits between retrieval and the clinician. Every response is checked for relevance, grounding in the source document, and internal consistency before it reaches the screen. When those checks are not met, the system flags this clearly rather than presenting an unverified answer as reliable guidance.
Where multiple guidelines address the same clinical scenario differently, TrustGuide highlights those differences explicitly instead of synthesising a single answer and obscuring the disagreement from the clinician.
The impact I hope TrustGuide delivers is straightforward: clinicians working in high‑pressure settings should be able to trust the AI‑assisted information they receive. At present, with most general AI tools, they cannot. TrustGuide is designed to change that, specifically for the environments where accuracy, safety, and clarity matter most.
What is the problem or challenge you are addressing in the NHS and why is it important?
Clinical guidelines exist for almost every scenario a doctor in ICU, anaesthetics, or emergency medicine will encounter. The problem is not the absence of guidance, but accessing it at the right moment and being able to trust the information provided.
General‑purpose AI tools have made information retrieval faster, but they have also introduced a new patient‑safety risk. These systems respond to every query with the same confident tone, whether the answer is well‑grounded or entirely fabricated. In a critical care environment at two in the morning with a deteriorating patient, a confidently wrong answer is not a minor inconvenience. It is a clinical risk.
I know this because I experienced it directly. An early version of my own tool, shown informally to a colleague, produced a plausible‑sounding answer to a question that was completely outside its knowledge base. Nothing in the output indicated that anything was wrong. That moment clarified the problem precisely: the NHS does not need faster AI, it needs AI that has been properly validated before it reaches the clinician.
A further issue, less visible but equally important, is that local trust protocols and national guidance sometimes differ on dose, timing, or management approach. Most tools blend these into a single response without flagging the conflict, leaving clinicians unaware that any disagreement exists. TrustGuide surfaces these differences explicitly, giving clinicians the clarity they need to make the right decision for their patient and their trust.
Why did you join the programme and how do you hope it will support you?
I discovered the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme through colleagues working in digital health and through NHS England’s wider innovation communications. The programme stood out because it supports clinicians developing innovations from within the NHS, which is exactly my position. I am not a technologist who identified a healthcare market; I am a doctor who encountered a specific clinical problem and built something to address it.
I applied because I had reached a point where the clinical insight and technical foundations were in place, but the pathway from prototype to clinical evaluation requires networks, governance knowledge, and institutional credibility that the NHS CEP provides. I could not build that alone.
My most immediate need is support navigating the path from working prototype to formal clinical evaluation within an NHS trust. That requires understanding how to structure a service evaluation appropriately, which governance frameworks apply, and how to have the right conversations with the right people in NHS innovation and informatics teams.
Beyond that, I hope the programme helps me build relationships with senior NHS leaders and Health Innovation Networks (HIN’s), connections that would take years to establish independently. The credibility of being part of a nationally recognised programme, and the introductions that come with it, are genuinely difficult to replicate outside it.
I am most looking forward to is the cohort itself. The problems other entrepreneurs are tackling, and the different routes they have taken to get there, will sharpen my own thinking considerably. The mentorship and NHS England connections are equally important, but the peer network is the part I expect to be most immediately valuable.
What are your ambitions for the next year?
My primary ambition for the next twelve months is to complete an informal clinical evaluation of TrustGuide within at least one NHS trust, generating real‑world evidence of how it performs in a high‑acuity clinical environment. That evidence will form the foundation for everything that follows, including further funding applications, a formal pilot, and ultimately a route to NHS adoption at scale.
Alongside this, I have a perspective piece currently under review at a peer‑reviewed journal, arguing for a clearer regulatory distinction between consumer AI chatbots and properly validated clinical decision support tools. Demonstrating that TrustGuide contributes to the intellectual as well as practical development of this field matters to me personally, not just commercially.
Why do you think innovation is healthcare is important?
Healthcare innovation matters most when it addresses problems that clinical practice alone cannot solve. Clinicians are extraordinarily skilled at working around the limitations of the systems and tools they have. The danger of that adaptability is that it can mask problems that should be fixed rather than worked around.
The gap between the guidelines that exist and the speed and reliability with which clinicians can access them in the most demanding environments is one of those problems. It has existed for years, and clinical ingenuity has managed it, but managing a problem is not the same as solving it. The patient‑safety cost of that gap is real, even if it is difficult to measure directly. That is why I believe the kind of innovation TrustGuide represents matters: not innovation for its own sake, but innovation that targets a specific, evidenced clinical problem with a solution that can be held to account.
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