Faces of Digital Health

Israel is a country of 8.5 million people, attributing around 7.5 % of the GDP to healthcare. Serial entrepreneurship is the norm here, fueled by military service discipline, high population education and good ties with the best education institutions and big industry players from the USA. Digital Health is taken seriously on the national level in Israel. There is even a special Department for Dig...

Clinical trials are essential from many aspects. They are needed for assessment of safety, efficacy, and superiority of existing drugs, therapies, equipment. They are essential to an assessment of new scientific findings. However, many challenges surround them. Medicinisto is a young German startup connecting medical experts to the industry. In this episode, its CEO Guido Axman explains how the co...

In this episode Anna Dubovik, a data analyst working for the government of Moscow talks about IMIAS - Integrated Medical Information and Analytical System. It connects more than 660 clinics and over 23.6 thousand medical practitioners in Moscow. The system offers pretty much everything and more you could imagine and expect from a high-tech clinical IT system: electronic health records are stored i...

In this podcast, two brilliant women explain applications of blockchain in healthcare. The first expert you are about to hear from is Nadia Thibault Diakun. She was in the team of researches that wrote a whitepaper titled Blockchain and Health IT: Algorithms, Privacy, and Data. The second part of the podcast is an interview with Chrissa McFarlane, CEO and Founder of Patientory. The young startup r...

Do you, or have you, ever owned or tries a wearable sensor? Wearable devices for healthcare are estimated at 870 million USD today. The market is supposed to grow to 4,4 billion USD by 2019, when the digital health market is estimated to be worth 172 billion USD. In this episode Manesh Juneja talks about his experience with trackers and the issue of data accuracy in wellness and healthcare. He has...

According to some estimates, it takes 17 years from a medical innovation to become a part of the standard practice in medicine. Adoption of technologies in healthcare is slow. Investments in digital health are rising - 8 billion USD was invested last year. But what does that even mean? What works, what not? What have we learned in the past years about business models in digital health? This was th...

When it comes to digitalization on a national level, German eHealth is lagging heavily behind other European countries. Fax machines still have an important place in healthcare, says Dr. Klaus Stöckemann. After obtaining his PhD in biology and pharmacology, dr. Stöckemann held several leading positions in research and development and business development. He then co-founded Peppermint VenturePartn...

Which funding models can digital health and biotech companies count on? This was one of the main topics at the last Charite Entrepreneurship Summit, held in Berlin at the beginning of May. In this episode dr. Klaus Stöckemann, co-founder of Peppermint VenturePartners (PVP), talks about digital health and healthcare digitalization in Germany and challenges startups face when evaluating and proving...

In 2004, after 14 years of research, The Human Genome Project was concluded. 99,9% of the human genome was sequenced and we learned that people have between 20,000 and 25,000 genes.  Genes are seen as a map to people’s health and diseases; the ultimate source of our health problems and wellbeing. Expectations of what could be explained with genetic testing are high, however, genes are a universe o...

In this episode, Sachin Gaur, a researcher, and entrepreneur in space of mobile and Internet solutions talks about cybersecurity and innovation in healthcare in India. After working and studying in Finland and Estonia, he returned to India and co-founded InnovatioCuris, a company focusing on connecting healthcare experts and looking at global innovation models and lean management processes to deli...

It is hard to imagine the size of the country with 1.3 billion people. That is the approximate population of India. In healthcare, the country faces many challenges: a big shortage of doctors, especially in rural areas, big differences in access to healthcare, the influence of pollution and environment on population health. The healthcare system is private, the majority of expenses - 60 to 70 perc...

Wearables and measurements. Which Point of Care devices are just gadgets and which ones bring actual better outcomes for patients? British researcher prof. dr. Anthony Turner, Head of The Biosensors and Bioelectronics Centre at Linköping University Sweden: “we haven’t yet made the sensors we really need, we are using the sensors that we happen to have.” That is why in recent years investors have b...

Internet forums have been here before smartphones and somehow, despite all the apps, they are still very much alive, especially for health information. They give patients information, support, psychological empowerment, and self-confidence. They offer doctors and developers an insight into behavior and thinking of patients. One big advantage of online forums is anonymity which gives users a certai...

In 2012 Cleveland Clinic experts designed the Medical Innovation Playbook – a detailed report on the diverse and rapidly evolving technology commercialization programs of the USA’s top medical centers. It includes an overview of nearly 10,000 invention disclosures, 6,400 patent applications and almost 2,000 issued patents. Many saw the opportunity in this technological revolution, by establishing...

In 2010 an idea was born: to build an army of entrepreneurs to improve health care worldwide. Only a year later the founders of StartUp Health pitched their vision to former U.S. president Barack Obama. On their January festival this year, former vice president in the Obama administration Joe Biden was one of their main speakers. According to their data, in five years, StartUp Health grew to an al...

Remember how if you go from central Europe to the UK or US, you can’t plug your charger into a socket, because they are different? They are not compatible. This is how a lot of medical data looks like. Data from devices in hospitals or from sensors and trackers cannot be transferred to your medical record automatically unless they are in a proper format. This can be done if systems are interoperab...

Healthcare and medicine are overwhelmed by innovation. There is a lot of excitement around digitization: convenience of telemedicine, electronic health records, apps, new devices. However, don't be overly excited. As Esther Dyson, a U.S. investor and opinion leader says, doctors, have values. Nurses have values. Digital solutions will not solve all the problems. But a lot of potential is there. A...