Faces of Digital Health

This episode is the first part of a two-part series about healthcare in Slovenia. Given that drug prices are a consistently controversial topic in the US healthcare system, the first part of the series explains European regulation. Why are drug prices in Europe more affordable? How does drug pricing and medication management work in Europe and Slovenia? Why is it hard to imagine that an opioid cri...

This is the second part of a two-part series about healthcare in Slovenia. Slovenia is a country of 2 million people, with a universal healthcare system, where electronic medical cards have been in place since the nineties. The interoperable backbone for main patient documents such as discharge letters has been in place since 2012. On the index of the digital economy and society 2018 prepared by t...

Patients are getting increasingly engaged in their treatments, becoming the decisionmakers not just recipients of care. But to design a successful solution for patient support with high user retention is, to put it mildly, an art. Every patient lives in a different home environment, has different personal goal and challenges, therefore a good disease management solution for patients needs to be hi...

Asia is the 2nd largest digital health ecosystem in the world. Investments in the sector totaled 6.3 billion in 2018. 5 Faces of digital health episodes are going to be published in July, offering an overview of the region, and some insights provided by speakers from China, Singapore, South Korea and India.

Developing countries are often seen as ideal test hubs for innovation: there's no existing infrastructure to disrupt, the regulation permits a faster speed of adoption. However, like any market, African countries have their own specifics. How can you scale in Africa? Can you reduce the price of your consumer solution to the affordability of African consumers? Moka Lantum, based in Kenya, is an exp...

G4A, formerly known as Grants4Apps is probably the most famous digital health accelerator inside a Pharma conglomerate. For a few years, the program was designed to support a handful of startups by offering them office space, various entrepreneurship skills training and network expansion. As the digital health market evolved, so has the program, with Eugene Barukhovich taking over the global head...

Longevity, eternal youth or even immortality have been an aspiration in religion and culture throughout history. Today, people adopt all sorts of approaches to increase their wellbeing, delay aging and avoid diseases. Efforts are increasingly quantified with sensors, wearables, or even biohacking - interventions to influence body biology. The new hope for advancements in longevity is seen in artif...

Estonia has only 1,3 million people but is famous worldwide for its digital governance. If you want, you can even become an Estonian electronic resident and run your business from Estonia, regardless of your country of residence. Healthcare wise, 95% of healthcare data is in digital form, some of it supported with blockchain technology. What does all this mean - is data structured or is informatio...

This short recording offers a snippet of thoughts about healthcare China, Japan, Germany, Dubai, Israel, Japan, and Bolivia.

ClinicalTrials.gov currently lists 302,091 clinical studies in the US. It is impossible for patients and their doctors to be aware of all clinical trials an individual might be eligible for. While one would expect the trials to be run and supported by sophisticated software, the reality is often far from that expectation. Patients often come to doctors inquiring about trials doctors might not even...

Anyone who wishes to learn about blockchain in general or specifically in healthcare can get overwhelmed by the number of results offered by a Google search. Awareness of the difficulty of finding credible, helpful and nuanced information around blockchain, was among the triggers to create the book Blockchain in Healthcare Innovations that Empower Patients, Connect Professionals and Improve Care....

Every person is unique and we all differ in our looks, but have you ever wondered, how much do people differ on the inside? This is something surgeons are most familiar with. Rafael Grossmann is known in the digital health community as the VR surgeon. Originally from Venezuela, Rafael has been practicing medicine for a few decades in the US by now. In this episode he talks about technological adva...

Hackathons have by today become a popular approach for bringing people with various backgrounds in the same room, offering them a concentrated time, usually during a weekend, to come up with innovative approached for various challenges. The speaker of episode 31 is Annie Lamontagne - Special Projects Advisor and former Head of Global Growth at Hacking health - a global digital health organisation,...

Hal Wolf III became the CEO of HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, the largest global organisation connecting healthcare IT providers) in 2017. While having rich experiences in the healthcare industry, he started his career in a very different sector — the entertainment business. Hal first workes in Sales and Marketing for MTV Networks in the 80s, later as VP of Content a...

Investments in digital health have been rising for the last few years, encouraging innovation in applications of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, analytics, and other latest technologies in healthcare. At the same time, the next generations of doctors, who are supposed to embrace and use these inventions, are trained in an outdated model with little room for creative engagement. One of th...

Chris Johnson is a Children’s Anaesthetist with 30 years of experience in clinical practice. Chris was the medical lead for the healthcare IT transformation of the Perth Children’s Hospital in Australia, which was planned after the institution relocated into a new building, approximately 10 years ago.  In the end, the robotics system was bought, but the EHR project had been stopped, leaving the ho...

The first episode of Faces of digital health offers a reflection on digital health in 2018, followed by a discussion on digital health in Malta. Because the country is small, the adoption of new solutions could be faster compared to bigger countries. Stefan Buttigieg, Specialist Trainee in Public Health Medicine with a special interest in Clinical Informatics, Social Media and Digital Health, and...

In 2012, right after finishing his PhD in neurobiology, Martin Inderbitzin got a rare type of pancreatic cancer. He found his strength in another patient's story. Martin's doctor told him about another young man, who survived and was now skiing in the mountains. For the doctor that was an anecdote, for Martin a mantra that kept his spirits up, every time he received a piece of bad news. He started...

What mistakes are entrepreneurs making? Why does the US seem like a better starting point compared to Europe in the early stages? How to look for support in the most initial stages of a company? In this episode: digital health investments and opportunities for startups. The speaker in this episode Jack van Lint. He is the Corporate Finance Director at NLC The Healthtech Venture Builder - a healthc...

In November 2018, Associated Press shocked the global medical community with a news from China: A Chinese researcher claimed that he helped make the world’s first genetically edited babies. He edited the genes of twins with CRISPR/Cas9 technology, with the aim to make the babies resistant to possible future infection with HIV, the AIDS virus. The medical community was more or less unanimous in con...

In the broadest possible sense, patient centricity is a mental shift from WHAT is done for the patient in the healthcare system, to HOW things are done. The HOW may include the used technology but also includes the environment. Walter Werzowa - Austrian composer, producer, and owner of LA-based music production studio Musikvergnuegen, and prof. dr. Klaus Laczika - An Austrian specialist in Emergen...

This episode is a recap of a few talks at 2018 Exponential Medicine. You will hear thoughts on interoperability, practical use of AI in enterprises, some bold ideas about the future medicine thanks to digital innovation by Vinod Khosla, and lucid thoughts regarding the affordability of novel digital health solutions and how we should reframe our thinking about management and leadership to improve...

In 2017 media started reporting on promising blockchain projects inside the US Center for Disease Control (CDC). The hopes are that blockchain could help decrease the burden of reporting of epidemics, antibiotic prescriptions and the opioid crisis in the USA. In this episode, health IT specialist Jay Jemal talks about what potentials of blockchain were recognized by the Center for disease control...

An update on the current landscape of healthcare blockchain projects, when can we expect practical implications, what the role of legislation will be, and how genomics research, AI and blockchain make a good combination. Intrigued? Listen to Ray Dogum - the host of Health Unchained - podcast focused on blockchain projects and implementation in healthcare. His background is in Health Sector Managem...

The key topic of today’s episode is pharmacy related robots, which will be presented by Lea Dias - a pharmacist by profession, who now works predominately as an advisor for international hospitals looking to implement robotic hardware and EHR software solutions to improve patient care. She comes from Australia, so we also touched upon the latest big digital health project in Australia - the digiti...