Page 80 of The Reluctant Billionaire
‘I’m sure it will be delicious, thank you, Sabrina,’ Mum says with a gentle incline of her head and the air of one breaking up a playground fight. ‘Paul, do not make her feel bad for doing her job.’
‘I would never,’ Dad says. He visibly slumps in his chair. ‘Thank you,’ he says to Sabrina in the tone of a defeated child.
‘Where was I?’ he asks when she’s left us. ‘Ah, yes. Aide. It was through UCL, I suppose. They were one of the feeder universities for our incubator—still are—and he must’ve applied through his professor. However it happened, I recall that his application was standout. Quite extraordinary.’
He lays his hands flat on the table and stares off into space, and I know in this moment that Dad’s terrifying brain has transported him to a world of zeroes and ones, as it so often does.
Shaking his head, he continues. ‘But when I met him—that’s when I knew he was special. He was, you know, a bit rough around the edges. He didn’t have that obnoxious polish some of the others we saw did. He was shy. Yes, shy. But articulate. Quietly confident, you know? Very much unshakeable in his vision, but it wasn’t born out of arrogance. More intelligence and the moral certitude of what he wanted to do.’
I blink. That might possibly be the longest speech I’ve ever heard my dad utter when he’s not standing on a podium with a proverbial gun to his head.
‘Wow. What was his vision?’
I mean, I know Totum is a medical data company. But, to be honest, I pretty much had brain freeze as soon as I read the wordsmedicalanddata.I haven’t read much about Totum, because I kind of assumed I wouldn’t understand much of it. I may be smart, but I donothave my father’s type of brain.
My parents exchange a glance.
‘You remember?’ Dad asks Mamma softly.
‘I do.’ She pretends to wipe a tear from her eye. ‘It was a very good pitch.’
‘It was,’ Dad says. ‘That’s the thing about Aide—he’s always been equally compelling on the quantitative and qualitative fronts.’ He spoons a mound of Thai salad onto his plate with a deeply sceptical look.
‘He had a friend,’ Mamma prompts.
‘That’s right. A friend, or a boy from school, maybe? Or from his community. I can’t recall. Anyway. This young person died at the hands of his father. Beaten to death.’
Oh myGod. I clap my hand over my mouth.
‘It turned out, in the aftermath, that there had been a pattern of abuse,’ Dad continues quietly. ‘Broken legs. Arms. I don’t recall the details. But here’s the thing.’ He leans in and grimaces. ‘The injuries were each treated at different hospitals,indifferent London trusts.’
I frown, trying to put the pieces together. ‘So…’
‘So the trusts didn’t share data. It transpires that the father had taken the child to a different hospital each time to avoid any healthcare professional spotting the pattern of abuse. Therefore, each time, they treated it as an isolated incident. The abuse wasnever spotted. Social services were never brought in, and the child went unprotected.’
Dad sits back, spreading his arms wide. He doesn’t need to say any more.
Until it was too late.
I stare at him, shocked. ‘What do you mean, they didn’t share data?’ I cry. ‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.’
Dad shrugs. ‘Patient confidentiality. The NHS had to prioritise that, and it didn’t have a way to make data available between individual trusts without risking a data breach. Until a young, precociously intelligent, and very, very angry young man decided to do something about it.’
‘Aide,’ I whisper.
I am shellshocked.
I had no idea there was such an emotive story behind Aide’s success. That the software, the massive company, he’s created was born out of anything other than the wish to scratch an intellectual itch.
‘Yep,’ Dad says. ‘He found a way to build data systems that were shareable while adhering to the strictest security standards. He found a way to have NHS trusts all over the country speak to each other, instantly, which is far trickier than it sounds, given the jumble of out-of-date, non-compatible systems our healthcare service uses. The name, Totum, meansallin Latin, of course.’
Of course it does. I’m a Classics graduate, and yet I haven’t thought about the meaning behind the name until now.All. Totality.Aide brought visibility, transparency, to our healthcare data, fuelled by his deep sense of injustice. Of frustration that anyone he knows should be left unprotected.
Or anyone at all, for that matter.
‘Most of its objectives are more prosaic, of course,’ Dad continues. ‘But that’s not to say they aren’t incredibly important.If you take a cancer patient being treated across various modalities and trusts, even, Totum’s functionality means every professional, oncologist or otherwise, can see all the clinical data and treatment history at a glance, no matter what hospital treated the patient. That may seem basic stuff, but I can assure you, in our dear, decrepit healthcare system, it’s not. And he’s sold the data globally. Most countries around the world have adopted Totum by now. It’s indisputably the market leader.’
‘He was so—what is the word—unassuming, that evening,’ Mamma muses. ‘But still very impressive. So impressive. And so handsome.’ She smiles fondly.
