Faces of Digital Health

If anyone, India is in dire need to increase access to quality care. According to WHO, the density of doctors of all types (allopathic, ayurvedic, unani and homeopathic) in 2001 was 8 doctors per 10,000 people, and the density of nurses was 6 nurses per 10.000 people. Project ECHO® is one of the players with an important role in bringing patients quality care with the help of a revolutionary medical education project. The ambition of Project ECHO is to touch the lives of 1 billion people by 2025. The project works by connecting doctors on the local level, allowing them to share and discuss their clinical cases through the lens of the latest clinical guidelines. In this podcast episode, the executive director of Project ECHO India — Sunil Anand and Kartik Dhar, Leading the ECHO Digital technical solutions development and India based product teams, talk about  the current state of healthcare in India,  government’s plans for “Modicare” - insurance coverage  of ₹500,000 (7200$) per year per family, for 500 million people, Digitization progress and governmental plans for an integrated approach to electronic health records.    Observations regarding mobile health: many startups are trying, penetration is not visible yet. More and more startups are shifting towards solutions in local language and there is a visible focus on mental health.

China’s population is larger than the population of the US and Europe combined. The country is becoming the leader in AI development. The enabling factor for China’s rapid advancement in AI is that Chinese Tech giants and government agencies are investing heavily the most important fuel for AI development - data infrastructures. In healthcare, for example, the company Yitu has a team of about 400 doctors, most of whom work part-time for about 10 hours a week to help label data. One-fifth of the healthcare team’s full-time employees have a medical background.  Asian countries were lagging behind in digitization in the past, which enabled them to leapfrog development with mobile phones. The consumers here use Tencent’s WeChat for shopping, paying bills and more. Understandably, Tencent’s new strides into healthcare are highly anticipated. According to Technode, Tencent is testing real-time clinic services in its WeChat wallet, and as reported by mobihealthnews, Tencent Trusted Doctor is among a number of technology-driven firms looking to shake up China’s overburdened public healthcare market. According to Phillips Future Health Index 2019 China is an outlier in terms of healthcare professionals encouraging their patients to track healthcare data.  Julie Wang talks about Chinese culture, entrepreneurship, and values driving digital health in China. Also listen to: How advanced is China in digital health?

Asia is the second-largest digital health ecosystem in the world. 2018 ended with a record-breaking 6.8 billion US dollars invested. According to IBC Asia, the digital health market is expected to reach $379 billion by 2024. Asian countries are leapfrogging the west in tech adoption. Many countries are turning into cashless societies where all transactions are done through mobile phones. At the same time, the culture in Asia is very different compared to the West. For a light start, this first episode will give you a broad overview of the region, with Julien de Salaberry, CEO and Founder of Galen Growth Asia. But before that, a few interesting thoughts about China, India, Singapore, and South Korea, from speakers in the upcoming episodes. The latest Gale Growth report about H1 of 2019 in Asia: https://bit.ly/2ZbgeKf

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 crisis or widespread use of ADHD drugs would happen in this part of Europe? The speaker explaining the topics is the Head of the medication management department at the Healthcare Insurance Institute of Slovenia Jurij Fürst.

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 the European Commission, Slovenia was ranked 6th according to the use of eHealth solutions. Tina Vavpotič, healthcare business strategist and consultant, with rich experience in healthcare policy design, healthcare IT product design and implementation, shares her thoughts about eHealth and digital health.

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 highly personalized. The discussion you will hear today is focused on exactly that: what aspects to take into account when we’re addressing patient behavior and patient empowerment, to which extent can technology decrease the need for real-life human coaches, since last years have shown that apps work best in combination with coaches. I spoke to Claire Kamoun - executive director of patient innovation at the French company MedClinik. Claire also shared her thoughts on technology adoption in France.

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 expert on the African healthcare market. He obtained his Doctor of Medicine training at Faculty of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, University of Yaoundé, Cameroon; a Diploma in Nutrition and International Child Health, from Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden; a Doctorate in Pharmacology, from the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York. He is a graduate of the Masters in Health Care Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. He has rich entrepreneurship history of developing solutions for the African market.

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 of G4A digital health development at Bayer in 2016. At the moment, G4A is present in some form or another in 35 countries. 8 accelerators/incubators run around the globe. This discussion explains how a global pharmaceutical corporation with almost 120.000 employees launched a digital health accelerator, what are the specifics of this year's application process, how are business scandals of digital health and biotech startups from the Silicon Valley affecting the ecosystem, Eugene briefly comments the Dutch and German digital health system.   To learn more about this year's G4A program and application, see this link: http://bit.ly/2JL1gWo You have until May 31st to apply!

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 artificial intelligence, which is becoming increasingly powerful. Alex Zhavoronkov has been researching the use of AI in aging for years. He is the CEO of Insilico Medicine, a Baltimore-based leader in the next-generation artificial intelligence technologies for drug discovery and aging biomarkers discovery. He truly is a well of knowledge - since 2012 he published over 130 peer-reviewed research papers and 2 books including "The Ageless Generation: How Biomedical Advances Will Transform the Global Economy" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). In this episode, he talks about the complexity of aging as a biological process, types of artificial intelligence and the role of AI in research advancements.   Some of his latest research articles include:  Blood Biochemistry Analysis to Detect Smoking Status and Quantify Accelerated Aging in Smokers - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-35704-w#author-information Artificial intelligence for aging and longevity research: Recent advances and perspectives - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S156816371830240X?via%3Dihub Artificial Intelligence for Drug Discovery, Biomarker Development, and Generation of Novel Chemistry - https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.molpharmaceut.8b00930 Listen also:  F013 What to expect from artificial intelligence in healthcare in the next 10 years? (Sally Daub, Enlitic) https://medium.com/faces-of-digital-health/f013-what-to-expect-from-artificial-intelligence-in-healthcare-in-the-next-10-years-fdaf2edf32f8