Up to 24% of operating-room time can be recovered without making a single operation faster, says surgeon and Proximie CEO Nadine Hachach-Haram. In this Faces of Digital Health interview, Nadine Hachach-Haram, a practising surgeon and the founder and CEO of Proximie, explains how the company moved from surgical telepresence to an ambient intelligence layer for the operating room, and why most of the inefficiency in surgery sits around the procedure rather than inside it. She discusses de-identification at source, what change management in hospital deployments involves, how Proximie uses AI internally, and what the same technology does in low-resource settings, from telementoring in Kenya to a remote-assisted operation on her own mother. Guest Nadine Hachach-Haram, Founder and CEO, Proximie; practising surgeon What the conversation covers • Operating-room efficiency: turnover time, first-case on-time starts and OR throughput • Ambient intelligence in the OR and the documentation burden on theatre staff • Why EHR data can misattribute surgical inefficiency • Surgical telepresence, remote telementoring and virtual scrubbing-in • Blurring and de-identification of OR video at source • Hospital implementation, hypercare and change management • How a health-tech company uses AI internally: an in-house productivity team • Surgery in the Global South and lessons for rural health systems • Procurement across the NHS, the US, Europe and the Middle East • The smart operating room: surgical co-pilots, robotics and connected intelligence Chapters 02:30 Introduction: access to surgery and running a company in the AI era 02:42 From telepresence to an operating-room intelligence layer 09:34 Ambient intelligence and the OR documentation burden 10:13 Regulation and de-identification at source 13:01 Hypercare and change management in hospital deployments 15:50 Clinically led product development and early scepticism 19:31 R&D investment and competition across 300,000 operating rooms 21:31 Running Proximie with AI: the internal productivity hub 28:33 A surgeon-CEO's AI stack, and its limits 33:57 Efficiency around the procedure: turnover and first-case starts 39:07 Surgery in the Global South and telementoring in Kenya 45:42 The patient perspective: a remote-assisted operation 49:12 Procurement, payment and the smart OR of the next decade Faces of Digital Health Website: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com Newsletter: https://fodh.substack.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/faces-of-digital-health Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4cElKJHrauyP6QJQaCkvdY Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/faces-of-digital-health/id1194284040 #FacesOfDigitalHealth #Proximie #SurgicalAI #OperatingRoom #GlobalSurgery #DigitalHealth #HealthcareAI
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