Faces of Digital Health

How many times in the last year or two have you heard that patients should own their data or have control over their data? These statements sound simple but are much more complex once you start to look at the implications they might have in practice. In June,  the European Patients’ Forum Congress took place in Brussels. The topic was the digital transformation of healthcare, data sharing, and the...

After several discussions about digital health in the APAC region, we are finishing the exploration in the region with a debate about healthcare digitalization in Pakistan. Pakistan has 242 million people. It’s the 5th largest population in the world. If you look at the website of the US state department, you will see advice to reconsider traveling to Pakistan. Life expectancy is low; the country...

Dr. Keren Priyadashini is Regional Business Lead of Worldwide Health for Microsoft Asia. She leads the company’s healthcare business segment across 17 markets in Asia Pacific. Looking at digital health investments in the APAC region, according to Galen Growth Asia, last year China took the highest amount of funding (58.6%) for digital health, followed by India (22.3%), Australia (5.6%), Soth Korea...

Many cancer survivors in long-term remission are faced with restricted access to financial services because of their medical history. Some EU countries have already implemented the right to be forgotten - a right for patients to not disclose their medical history. In most countries, the requirement is for the patient to be cancer-free for 10 years, France has changed this time limit to 5 years. Ch...

In the previous episode we explored healthcare and the position of doctors in Malaysia. Today and in the next few episodes, we will stay in the Asia Pacific region, by peeking into Australia, Pakistan Singapore, and more. My guest today is Peter Birch, creator, and host of Talking HealthTech; an Australian podcast and membership community about technology in healthcare. In the past, Pete has been...

In the previous episode, you could listen to Dr. Abeyna Bubbers-Jones - Founder & CEO - of Medic Footprints. Medic Footprints is a UK-based company, with a mission to bring various career opportunities to doctors. The projections of clinical workforce shortages are grim. WHO estimates a projected shortfall of 18 million health workers by 2030, mostly in low- and lower-middle-income countries. The...

WHO estimates a projected shortfall of 18 million health workers by 2030, mostly in low- and lower-middle-income countries. However, countries at all levels of socioeconomic development face, to varying degrees, difficulties in the education, employment, deployment, retention, and performance of their workforce.  In a recent survey of 20.000 doctors from 124 institutions in the US 1 in 5 said they...

Is it time to stop talking about digital health and just focus on health? Where, in which department, do digital health innovations fit within Pharma? Do we expect too much in terms of the speed of digital health innovation in Pharma? These were just some of the questions discussed at SPELLED OUT: Digital Health and Pharma event. SPELLED OUT is a group name of a series of events organised by Curat...

When the war in Ukraine began, Marta Kaczmarek welcomed one of the refugee families to her home. She then thought about how more could be done to help Ukrainians and started an incentive called EIT Health Ukraine. EIT Health, which is a European organsation connecting stakeholders in healthcare, partnered with the Polish Medical Mission. PMM is a 22 years old Polish humanitarian organization that...

Jennifer Schneider used to be the Chief Medical Officer and President of Livongo. In 2022 she started a company focused on improving access to healthcare in rural America. More than 46 million Americans, or 15 percent of the U.S. population, live in rural areas. Now the company called Homeward is on the mission to deliver care to those who don’t have it, starting in rural America. In this discussi...

Voice could be called one of the exciting new avenues for medicine and healthcare: first, it is seen as a potential optimization tool, if we used voice tech instead of typing data into software. A few months ago, Julia Hoxha, the CEO of Zana explained how her European startup that provides healthcare organizations with the technology to design and to deploy their own chatbot and voice assistants....

Investments in digital health have been steadily rising for the last seven years. 6.2 billion dollars were invested in digital health startups in 2015, 44 billion in 2022, according to Startup Health. Startup Health is a US-based organisation supporting digital health innovators across the world and globally spreading optimism about the potential of technology in healthcare. The vision that drives...

Hassan Chaudhury is a global healthcare expert, he worked in several countries across the world. He currently works at Healthcare UK; a joint initiative of the Department of Health and Social Care, NHS England and the Department for International Trade (DIT). His global role includes advising commercial teams in over 100 UK embassies. In this discussion, we chatted about the digital transformation...

Therapies for cancer are being developed at light speed and upward of 60 gene and cell therapies are projected to reach regulatory approval in the U.S. by 2030, according to the MIT NEWDIGS collaborative. Due to the nature of cancer, readiness for risks in drug development is much higher here than it might be in other medical fields. In this episode you’re going to hear a bit more about what can d...

In this episode, founders of four very different companies talk about their fundraising experiences. As critically mentioned by Fouad Al-Noor - Co-Founder & CEO - ThinkSono - we should stop talking about the myth that startups search for investors that can offer strategic benefits. It’s true, but fundraising is still primarily about getting money to be able to start a business. The key thing, in t...

SPECIAL APPEAL: Dear listeners, as the war in Ukraine continues, the need for medical help is increasing.  If you’re a clinician or a telehealth provider, please get in touch with Health Tech Without Borders. Health Tech Without Borders is organising a "Ukraine Telehealth Relief" initiative to provide free of charge telehealth and remote consultations to the people of Ukraine. So if you’re a clini...

When one starts to wonder about why data-sharing is still more or less cumbersome in healthcare, you quickly get to the challenges with interoperability siloed data and of course, data standards. Sharing of data has improved with the introduction of the messaging standard called FHIR. But throughout the years, debates about open standards and open ecosystems have started to become louder. In this...

Many software solutions for healthcare could be described as lacking empathy. Too often, solutions are addressing products viability and feasibility, but put desirability in the second place of priorities, says Tim Peck is Executive Portfolio Director of Health at IDEO. He is an entrepreneur and a Harvard-trained Emergency Medicine physician, who has been practicing human-centered design for over...

Voice tech is one of the tech areas with high potential to optimize healthcare processes for providers and ease chronic disease in management for patients. In reality: How far are we from futuristic ideas where everything would be operated with the help of voice? How do innovators reduce the risk of misunderstandings in designing voice technologies? What does the development of human-like bots loo...

This is the second episode about digital health transformation in the Middle East. I spoke with Michele Tarnow, a healthcare leader experienced in managing across multi-national geographies, organization boundaries, and matrix organizations. Michelle has been living in UAE since 2016 and shared her insights into how are countries in the Middle East approaching digitalization of healthcare, how doe...

In the next two episodes, we’ll dive into healthcare development a digitalization in the Middle East. You’re going to hear from two speakers based in Dubai. The speaker of today’s episode is Ziad Tabet, Chief Customer Officer at Alliance Care Technologies. Ziad is a healthcare veteran with three decades of experience spanning many aspects of the healthcare space. He has extensive experience in ope...

Unsafe medication practices and medication errors are a leading cause of injury and avoidable harm in health care systems across the world. Exactcure is a digital health startup from France addressing the challenge of preventing the negative effects of medications. The company is building a digital twin simulator, that shows the effects and interactions of drugs in the body of an individual. They...

If you took part in the Clubhouse frenzy last year, you probably came across the Digital Health Channel and MedNet club. Digital Health Channel which currently has 6400 members, was among the key digital health topics related hubs on Clubhouse with an active schedule of discussions each week. It was founded by MD Jhonatan Bringas and healthcare expert Amit Goldman. MD Diana van Stijn who was often...

The positive potentials of AI in healthcare are breathtaking. From smoother processes to more accurate care with fewer medical errors. But if we learned anything from the last 15 years of living with social media, it is that the development of algorithms without proper regulation can have negative impacts on society. In healthcare, AI development is still in the early stages. Many regulation-relat...

Antimicrobial resistance is a global problem related to the overuse of antibiotics and the lack of development of new ones. Many solutions are entering the market to address the issue: software solutions to identify, track and predict antibiotic-resistant infections and help prescribers with more accurate prescribing of antibiotics.  Antibiotics are not appealing to the pharmaceutical industry fro...