The recent Digital Health Summit, on June 19 and 20th, produced by Living in Digital Times and CEO Jill Gilbert was a resounding success. The focus was to bring companies and industry experts to connect and transform the fast evolving space of digital health. The location for the event was at the Terra Gallery in San Francisco which provided an very nice atmosphere with high ceilings, visually appealing decor, wifi access and power outlets for our laptops. I was impressed with the quality of the content and speakers for this event and was immersed in the vision of the future.
Highlights of the first day of the event started with Lessons Learned from Broken Businesses with moderator Lisa Suennen of Venture Valkerie, David Dickinson CIO of Optum Labs dealing with big data stated that “you must pay attention to your customer feedback” a lesson they learned. He also focused on the dictum “follow the problems in healthcare” a deep insight to the actual needs is the driving factor and focus on your solution. Rick Lee, CEO of M3 Information stated that they raised $16M in two rounds of funding with only Venture Capital, then on their C round only one of the funders wanted to proceed with followup funding and the other did not, which caused problems going forward. Zack Lynch, founder of Neurotech an Industry organization, conveyed that getting product to market on time was their failure, their product went one year over expected completion. They met with 60 investment bankers for M&A but were unsuccessful due to product delays, so they had no takers. His new wisdom was “look at the ecosystem and meet early with prospective acquirers, get on their radar early.
Lifelong Tech – Aging by Design was moderated by Amy O’Connor VP editorial director of Everyday Health. The focus was on technologies that would help our aging population. Eric Baczuk Sr, interaction designer at Frog a leading design firm stated that “products should not label the elderly as frail” and one product demonstrated was Whill a newly designed futuristic “Tesla of motorized wheel chair” which was very cool and it allowed for mobility on a new level. Jeff Makowa, Sr strategic advisor and thought leadership at AARP stated that to develop the next evolution of products for the elderly “passion is important” and an empathy for the real world problems and experiences of the elderly.
Killer Partnerships between industry giants and early innovators could have been more exciting but was rather tepid in its delivery. Lee Simmons, writer and editor of Wired Magazine moderated two sessions. IBM Watson + Welltok is partnering to deliver “health concierge with optimum health recommendations” stated Jeff Margolis, CEO of Welltok. Most of the information was speculative and I found no true direction as of yet. MCO + Reebok was more informative in that this collaboration has delivered value in sensors that determine head impact measurements that have been applied to football helmets for kids playing football. Isaiah Kacyvenski, Director of Sports Segment of MC10 stated that their aim was to make it easy to read with LEDs yellow, red and green lights on impact assessment. The future of sensor technology is looking bright and MC10 is a leader in wearable and flexible sensors.
The second day of the symposium I attended the Human Equation: Cultivating High-Impact Results session. The moderator, Kimberly Petty is the managing director of Vocera where this session’s focus was on patient centric healthcare, data, motivation, changing behavior and impact on improving health. Samir Damani, MD FACC a cardiologist and founder of MD Revolution discussed how creating a change in behavior must be preceded with 5 pillars of motivation, I actually did not know there were so many facets of motivation. Mark Hanson, co-founder of BeClose conveyed that keeping the elderly at home is a very important need and their company does this by helping with a system of monitoring and communication.
Rise of the Machines a session moderated by Andra Keay, managing director of Silicon Valley Robotics focused on an explosion in technological advances in the world of robotics. Robotics in healthcare is expected to be a $46 Billion industry by 2017. Mark Stephen Meadows, Founder of Geppetto Avatars discussed their technology that is a platform for robotics applications. They have a technology platform that allows for interaction with the user by way of gestures, expression, tone and context to have human to machine interaction. The system has natural language recognition, artificial intelligence and mobile networks technologies that help understand human commands and gestures. Think of Michael Knight in Knight Rider TV show and Kit, the interactive voice or Tony Start and Jarvis his computer companion that interacts with him in his Ironman suite on in his lab. These are the new visions of human interaction with our environment, patients and doctors talking to new avatars that will help you be healthy.
Frontline Innovators a session moderated by Dr Aenor Sawyer, associate director of the Digital Health Innovation Center at UCSF who was gracious and informative. “Frontline innovators, doctors, providers experience problems and they can provide solutions”, she said, “from idea to impact, make sure you have healthcare innovators on your development team”. Healthcare information systems have a problem of silos, data silos, disparate information systems and locked information, lets make it inter-operable by having APIs that help unlock the information and make it useful and accessible. Karin Cooke, director of the Innovation Fund for Technology at Kaiser Permanente said that they are very focused on innovation and have funded 100 ideas, 20,000 doctors and 50,000 nurses provide problem solution scenarios and ideas. They are looking to solve key strategic problems which will secure information and provide increased patient safety and outcomes. Richard Rothe, VP Strategic Innovation for Dignity Health discussed their program of idea design and implementation called “Run, Run, Jump”. Innovation in its basic form is to take ideas in the clinical setting, develop a plan and implement then measure quality improvement and cost reduction. Jayleen Casano, Executive Director at Dignity Health discussed their program to prevent over testing of patients, especially evaluating patients with cardiac symptoms and psychiatric symptoms. These are very difficult areas to aim at reducing testing since a mis-diagnosis could be a dire consequence.
In summary, I found the event to be focused more on large industry and its “Titanic Ship Problem”, how do you direct the big ship to avoid the ice berg of irrelevance. This is of great concern for large corporations where pivoting in a new direction takes very long whereas startup companies are the nimble vessels that provide the direction for the future. Success in delivering the solutions of tomorrow’s healthcare depends upon supporting the healthcare startup community.
Addition coverage of the Digital Health Summer Summit by Hilary Weber.
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