Collaborating for innovation: insights from the FT Digital Health Conference

It was a pretty good line-up…

Earlier this week I attended the FT European Digital Health Summit. Below are a few of the key themes which resonated throughout the day:

Theme 1: The success of digital health requires partnering with those who are not ‘traditional experts’:

• Smaller companies bring new approaches e.g. digital health companies were the ones to pioneer tech-led app assessment, versus assessment experts, developing a solution which has now been commissioned more widely
• Patients are experts by experience, including in product design. We heard from a patient who hacked her insulin pump to an open-source artificial pancreas. Patients have the knowledge and risk appetite to experiment in ways that others can’t
• Organisations driving wellness need to partner with those trusted to deliver messages — e.g. for adolescent mental health, the messages could be better delivered by an Instagram influencer than clinical psychiatrists

Theme 2: Digital health solutions are designed in the context of their local system and values, which may not always translate internationally:

• European companies are at an advantage in Europe, because they know the ethos on which a system is built e.g. risk pooling, universal access, local regulations; compared to markets where consumers have different attitudes to privacy, access etc. ‘Data donation’ works if the patients get transparent feedback and can see their data has been used for the use case intended (e.g. researching a cure); the idea of data being abused is a huge barrier to donation
• Preventative medicine is culturally important in China: as a result, people will pay a monthly subscription for reminders to drink water eight times a day. They have created a unique regulatory environment, and are leading in many areas of health tech (e.g. Tencent’s internet hospital, Alibaba’s work in imaging diagnostics, and Baidu’s health AI fund)
• The NHS Clinical Entrepreneurship programme is now seen as a leading global clinical entrepreneurship programme, even compared to programmes like Stanford Biodesign, resulting in improved retention of doctors and solutions which can have local impact

Theme 3: The role of the patient in digital health needs careful consideration:

• Gamifying health, especially when using financial incentives, has the potential to simply add to the burden of patients struggling to cope with a condition. For example, if patients are to engage with their own health, will they be held accountable for the results? Do they have sufficient skills and coaching to do so?
• Patient feedback on digital solutions is a valuable data point, and needs to be considered alongside harder endpoints for comparison studies. E.g. comparing the accuracy alone of continuous glucose monitors vs. fingerprick tests doesn’t account for other quality of life benefits benefits — for example for families with children with T1 diabetes being able to sleep through the night rather than wake up their children every night for a test
• What is within a patient’s control? Recognising the social determinants of health (e.g. stable employment, adequate housing) is important to minimise, rather than widen, the health inequality gap. In a similar way, digital health can be used to great success in emerging markets but needs to be designed with these patients in mind

If you’re interested in chatting more on any of the above, let me know!