Dr. Mohammed Al-Ubaydli: A Journey Forged in Crisis

This week on Beyond the Boardroom, we sit down with an extraordinary guest: Dr. Mohammed Al-Ubaydli, the CEO and Founder of one of the world’s largest personal health records companies, Patients Know Best. His journey from a childhood in conflict zones to a First Class degree from Cambridge and leadership in medical software is nothing short of incredible.

Dr. Al-Ubaydli’s life experiences instilled the resilience and unconventional thinking that defines his business approach. He shares the story of his upbringing, born in Bahrain and moving to Yemen shortly after, where his earliest memory is being bitten by a scorpion while sleeping on the floor. His family was eventually exiled from Bahrain in the 1970s and traveled through countries like Syria and war-torn Lebanon, constantly adapting to new, sometimes dangerous, environments.

The Core Values of an Entrepreneur

Despite the turmoil, his parents—an academic and an artist—shielded him, giving him two constant and crucial values: family and education. This grounding in education led him on a fascinating dual academic path: studying medicine and computing. He explains his unique motivation: he wanted to be the first doctor who also knew how to program in order to write software that could model the human body’s chaotic systems. After being turned down by four medical schools, Cambridge ultimately accepted him, allowing him to combine his two passions.

Dr. Al-Ubaydli describes his personal ambition not as a drive to win or be competitive, but a desire to fix things that everyone else deems impossible. This ambition is the foundation of his career:

• The Problem Solver: He found enjoyment in learning and experimenting, using business as a vehicle to learn. He would tackle problems by researching and writing books about them, setting himself a syllabus of knowledge until he found the problem worth dedicating his life to.

• The Ultimate Freedom: His time in academia made it clear that while it offered a predictable career path, it lacked the freedom to experiment. This realization is what motivated him to start his own company.

The Mission to Fix Global Healthcare

His personal health journey ultimately defined his professional one. As a child, he struggled with a rare immune disorder, meaning he couldn't produce specific antibodies, causing vaccines to fail or even give him the infection. His highly educated mother meticulously collected all of his health data, arguing with doctors using her personal records until he was eventually diagnosed and treated at Great Ormond Street Hospital.

This experience was the origin story of Patients Know Best. By putting himself in control of his own treatment (learning to self-inject antibodies), he realized that giving data to the patient enables better, more efficient care at scale.

He explains that in 2007, everyone—including tech giants like Microsoft and Google—was attempting to solve the problem of sharing health records, but they were doing it wrong. Dr. Al-Ubaydli realized this was the "impossible" problem worth devoting his life to, determined to fix it from a patient's perspective.

Listen to the full episode as Dr. Al-Ubaydli shares invaluable lessons on entrepreneurship, the NHS, and how to take control of your own health and achieve true success.