How to make an impact in digital health? 4 inspiring talks for startups

Digital health is rapidly increasing

The pandemic of COVID-19 has amplifying digital technology innovation to historic levels – reports Accenture in the survey Digital Health Technology Vision 2020. 85% of health executives believe that technology has become “an inextricable part of the human experience.” And 70% of consumers globally expecting that their relationship with technology will be more prominent in the next 3 years. The survey indicates also that 45% of health executives "believe rapid advancement in new technologies, as well as scientific innovations, are primed to disrupt the industry". There is huge space for innovations and medicine is one of the most top industries in applied patents to the European Patent Office. 

Digital Health also is a constant topic in almost every edition at the Infoshare conference. That’s why having in mind innovators we chose inspiring speeches and talks brought by startup founders and healthcare experts to show how to disrupt this industry considering different perspectives. 

The future of healthcare is coming

Lutz Haase has more than a decade of digital industry experience consulting Medtech & pharma companies on digital transformation, cultural change, and product & service innovation. During his energetic speech at Infoshare 2019, he was explaining why the healthcare industry is so different and not so easy to disrupt. He was presenting the main trends and paradigms in a nutshell. Healthcare is a broad term so in this video you can watch what projects selected by Lutz from these nine subjects:

• personalized analytics & therapy
• telemedicine & AI
• robotic companions
• gene editing, stem cells
• personalized nutrition & food
• VR/AR therapy
• diagnostics & wearables
• medical 3D printing
• health literacy

are worth checking. Among mentioned are for example an app that shows you do product you've ordered is delivering you healthy benefits or hardware in the shape of the ring that tracks sleep.

As the expert said creating the future of healthcare, we need paradigm shifts: the customer needs-centric approach, regulatory needs to be adopted and technology need to replace the lack of staff. And startups need to go fast because it's a very competitive market dominated by big players.

Lutz recommends:

You need to innovate. Move fast, otherwise, someone else is eating the cake.

Do something useful

Nick Guldemond is an advisor and key expert on technology-enabled healthcare transformation for various governments on different continents, international NGOs as well as multinationals and start-ups. And we had the pleasure to host him at Inspire Stage during Infoshare 2019.

In his speech "How to startup in healthcare, do something useful, and not to crash down", Nick is telling about the social and economical challenges such as aging socialites or the growth of healthcare expenses and discuss key factors, how to build a sustainable innovation ecosystem.

It can be an interesting and eye-opening talk for startup founders because Nick is telling from the perspective of a healthcare professional focused on evidence and proof. And among others, he points to the problem of false promises, when innovation it’s not delivering the promise it's it sells. Companies are raising a lot of capital in investment but they not delivering better healthcare, the innovation doesn’t have a real impact on patients. Startups need to think differently about how to bring value to the people. 

One of the interesting conclusions Nick points out in his speech:

The solutions should be a focus on increasing the efficiency of healthcare. Doing more using less costs and resources. And technology need to reduce operational costs.

Build trust and be agile

StethoMe is the startup that created the world's first intelligent respiratory stethoscope for home use. In the Grow with Tech podcast episode, we asked Wojciech Radomski, the founder of StethoMe about new solutions in modern medicine, difficult business decisions, and expansion in foreign markets. What technological challenges do founders need to face? An enormous amount of medical data, regulations for every component takes time, building trust. How they convince doctors and patients about their technology? At the very beginning, it was not easy.

When we went to a couple of the doctors trying to get their feedback about this idea, they didn't even want to talk with us, because they were afraid that, we will exchange doctors into AI. At that point in time, we decided that it's very important to change our approach. So it was the very very early pivot when we change our approach into not detecting the diseases, not diagnosing the diseases, but provide a tool that will be supportive for the doctor.

said Wojciech Radomski during the talk in the podcast. 

The story shows how important is to listen to your customers and pivot if is needed. We recommend this talk also companies producing hardware because Wojciech also mentioned how important is to hire an engineer responsible for manufacturing. And it's a different kind of story than building the prototype.

Listen more in Grow with Tech podcast (episode #8) >>>

The revolution is yet to come

In the podcast, we also hosted Tomasz Mikosz, the founder and CEO of another successful Polish MedTech startup – FindAir, the creators of an intelligent inhaler for asthma control.

He has shared with us how the process of idea validation looks like, where Medtech startups can find investors and how a company can sell its ideas. We also talked about everyday challenges in running a startup (sense of mission helps in struggles) and how the pandemic can change the whole landscape. 

I think the focus might be in the few years, years towards healthcare in general and to healthcare technology included MedTech. Like we had with social media, there was a trend in startups and there was quite a revolution there. Then we had the blockchain revolution and so on. I think the Med-tech, the healthcare sector will have this kind of revolution. 

predicts Tomasz Mikosz.

Check out the whole talk in Grow with Tech podcast (episode #2) >>>