A Cambridge-trained physician who put down the stethoscope to build the AI layer for medical chart review - and sell it to the hospitals he used to work in.
Walk into any hospital and there is a quiet, expensive problem hiding in plain sight: the medical record. Years of notes, labs, scans and discharge summaries, written in shorthand by busy people, scattered across systems that do not talk to each other. Somebody has to read all of it to answer a simple question - did this patient meet the criteria, qualify for the trial, get the right care. Usually that somebody is a nurse or a clinician with a spreadsheet and not enough hours. Alastair Blake is in the business of replacing the spreadsheet.
As Chief Business Officer of Layer Health, an MIT spinout, Blake runs the commercial engine behind a platform that uses large language models to do clinical chart review at scale. The company calls it the AI layer for chart review - software meant to read longitudinal medical charts the way a careful doctor would, only faster and without getting tired at 2am. Blake's own description of himself is tidier: "a commercial leader with deep healthcare data and technology experience, both as a physician and a business innovator."
That double identity is the whole point. Blake is not a salesperson who learned medicine from a deck. He is a doctor who learned to sell. When he walks into a health system to talk about automating chart review, he has, at some point in his career, done the manual version himself.
The chart already holds the answer. The hard part is reading all of it.The premise behind Layer Health's AI chart review
Blake started where most doctors do and few leave: clinical medicine. He read Physiology, Development and Neuroscience at Cambridge, took an MD there, and earned membership of the Royal College of Physicians - the MRCP(UK), the exam British junior doctors lose their twenties to. He trained as an internal medicine resident in the NHS, working the floors of London hospitals.
Then he did the unusual thing. He went inside the machine. A National Medical Director's Clinical Fellowship placed him at the Care Quality Commission, the body that inspects and regulates English health and social care. It is one thing to treat patients; it is another to sit at the desk that grades the hospitals. That fellowship gave him a systems-level view of healthcare before he ever tried to change it from the outside.
In 2018 he appeared on the Penn HealthX Podcast - then an MBA student at Wharton - to talk through the differences between the US and UK health systems, the incentives that bend clinical practice, and the junior physician strikes back home. It was, in hindsight, a man narrating his own pivot in real time: a doctor working out loud why he was moving toward business.
After Wharton came McKinsey, where Blake spent two years and rose to Engagement Manager - the consulting world's name for the person who actually runs the project. From there he joined nference, a healthcare data and AI company, leading clinical and commercial partnerships for more than three years. That is where the two halves of his resume fused: the clinical credibility of a physician, the commercial machinery of a strategist, both pointed at the same problem - what to do with the mountain of unstructured data that hospitals generate and rarely use.
In April 2024 he took the Chief Business Officer chair at Layer Health. Less than a year later, the company closed a $21M Series A. The arc is clean, even if the years inside it were not: bedside, regulator, business school, consultancy, data company, startup. Each stop added a language he would later need to speak.
How do you turn medical knowledge into something that scales beyond a single doctor's shift?
Internal medicine resident in the UK, then a National Medical Director's Clinical Fellowship inside the regulator that inspects English healthcare.
Trades the ward for health care management, studying how money and incentives shape medicine.
Goes on the record comparing the US and UK systems and the junior-doctor strikes - thinking out loud about leaving clinical practice.
Engagement Manager. Learns to run the project, not just sit on it.
Spends three-plus years at the intersection of healthcare data, AI and the deals that put them to work.
Joins the MIT spinout building AI for chart review. In 2025 it raises a $21M Series A.
Layer Health spun out of MIT with a team spanning machine learning, clinical medicine, product and commercial. Its founders include CEO and MIT professor David Sontag. Its bet is simple to say and hard to do: point large language models at longitudinal medical charts and pull out insight that used to require a human reading every page.
Clinical chart review is manual, slow and resource-heavy. The information exists - it is just buried in unstructured notes across years of care.
LLMs that read longitudinal records the way a careful clinician would, turning a manual process into something faster and more consistent.
Launched in 2023 with $4M from GV, General Catalyst and Inception Health; raised a $21M Series A in 2025 led by Define Ventures with Flare Capital and others.
A spinout with an academic spine - machine-learning researchers and clinicians who decided the lab was too small a stage for the idea.
As CBO, he carries the commercial weight: partnerships with health systems, registries and the institutions that actually own the charts.
Few commercial leaders in health tech have worked clinical shifts. Blake has - which is exactly why the pitch lands.
He stacks credentials the way other people collect stamps: a BA, an MD, an MRCP and an MBA, spanning neuroscience, medicine and business.
He has worked both sides of the Atlantic's health systems - trained and practiced in the NHS, then built a career in US health tech.
His email handle is simply "ali" - the short form of Alastair, hiding behind all those letters after his name.
He's a doctor who sells software to doctors. In a field full of outsiders pitching clinicians, he's the rare insider.
Give the clinicians back the hours the chart keeps stealing.The aspiration behind the work
Sources: Layer Health, The Org, LinkedIn, Equilar ExecAtlas, HLTH, MobiHealthNews, FinSMEs, Crunchbase, Penn HealthX Podcast, Wharton Health Care Management. Profile compiled from public records. Career dates approximate where reported by third parties.