What happens when healthcare technology is not designed for people, but with them?

InSubstantia welcomes Anam Hijab, the founder of AtPulse, a health technology company tackling one of the largest and least understood diabetes crises in the world. Pakistan is home to 55 million people living with or on the verge of diabetes. Anam is building technology to address this crisis. 

Following a career in pharmaceutical engineering in Denmark, Anam came back to Pakistan to apply that expertise where it could matter most. In this episode, she shares her experience of building systems on the ground in Pakistan, working with one of the largest cardiovascular hospital networks in the world.

This conversation moves beyond product features and into first principles: how culture shapes care, why Western health models fail at scale in high-density populations, and what it means to design technology for communities rather than individuals. 

• 00:00 – Introduction: Anam Hijab’s background and the scale of Pakistan’s diabetes crisis

• 02:24 – Pakistan as a “melting pot” shaping identity and worldview

• 04:00 – Why Denmark? Education, equality, and the Nordic model

• 07:53 – Returning to Pakistan and identifying a market opportunity

• 10:15 – Understanding the real diabetes crisis

• 13:58 – When diabetes compounds into systemic failure

• 16:03 – Why patients disappear after treatment (70–90% dropout)

• 20:32 – Inside NICVD: what 1,000+ patients per day teaches about systems

• 25:52 – Designing the product and breaking assumptions about how people use technology

• 29:16 – Why the app is offline, visual, and audio-first

• 33:35 – The responsible implementation of AI in healthcare 

• 40:06 – Who owns the value of healthcare data?

• 42:15 – Predictive care and risk profiling

• 45:01 – How to balance revenue with community impact

• 50:12 – Being a woman founder in Pakistan

• 55:04 – What Pakistan revealed that Europe didn’t

• 01:00:08 –  Cultural gaps in European healthcare models

• 01:03:09 – Climate change and chronic disease 

• 01:18:37 – Towards a localized, intuitive healthcare for everyday life

• 01:10:15 – Medical language vs patient understanding 

  Resources: 

  Learn more about AtPulse https://atpulse.org/ 

  
  Chapters:
  Connect with Anam Hijab https://www.linkedin.com/in/anam-h-73b945122/