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 role of patient organizations in this story.  This episode recaps some of the patient opinions at the EPF Congress. Watch the panel sessions: epfcongress.eu Read the recap: www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/what-do-patients-really-think-about-data-recap-of-the-epf-congress

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 attributes only 1.1 % of its GDP to healthcare. Yet, as mentioned by Zahid Ali, HIMSS Future50 Health IT Leader 2021, A digital health and innovation thought-leader and Consultant, the strategy Pakistan took in the fight against COVID was recognized by WHO as exemplary. So what is the state of healthcare digitalization in the country, and what can other countries learn from Pakistan? That’s the topic of today’s discussion. Do check out other episodes about the APAC region: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/digital-health-in-apac-an-overview-keren-priyadashini-microsoft-asia facesofdigitalhealth.com 

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 (4.3%), and Singapore (3.8%). Healthcare expenditure differs a lot among countries: According to the World Bank, China attributed 5,3% of its GDP to healthcare, India 3%, Australia 9.91 %, Singapore 4%. How do these healthcare systems differ and does healthcare expenditure relate to investment in digitalization? More content at: www.facesofdigitalhealth.com Leave a rating or a review: www.lovethepodcast.com/facesofdigitalhealth.com

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. Changes across Europe are happening very slowly. The understanding of the problem is poor and needs a lot more awareness. The incidence of cancer is increasing, however, at the same time, treatments are becoming more successful, returning long-lasting health to patients. Due to this scientific advancement, social care and policies should be changed as well.  Dr. Françoise Meunier is Member of the Belgian Royal Academy of Medicine, she was Director General of European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer for 24 years from 1991 to 2015. She is also a Scientific Member of the European Cancer Patient Coalitio

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 running clinics, and software companies, he is still company Director at MetaOptima, creating intelligent technology to help doctors detect and treat skin cancer. He is also the company Director of the Medical Software Industry Association (MSIA), representing the software vendors of the healthcare industry in Australia. Clearly, Pete has a good understanding of tech challenges in healthcare which he shared in this discussion. We talked about the current state of My Health Record, why is Australia not a leader in exemplary telehealth solutions, what it means that the government plans to dedicate 107 million Australia

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 previous and this episode explore the doctor’s perspective on career development and opportunities in and outside of healthcare. In the UK in the previous episode and in Malaysia in this one. You will hear from Selina Chew - the founder of Medic Footprints Malaysia, which is a franchise of the UK organization. Its mission is the same: to empower doctors to look value their skills and look for new career opportunities if they feel stranded in their current situation. Selina talked about her own experience as a doctor, and the rigidity of hierarchy in healthcare which makes it very difficult for doctors to have autonom

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 plan to exit healthcare in the next 5 years. The pandemic hasn’t only brought different strains to healthcare workers, It has also radically redefined ways in which work can be done. Generations today have different expectations of their working conditions and career development. In this episode, you’re going to hear a bit more about what do doctors want? Speaker: 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. May it be inside or outside healthcare. In the episode, she talks about what options d

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 Curated Health and Faces of digital health, with which we wish to bring clarity to specific digital health-related topics. The debate was moderated by Tjaša Zajc, host of Faces of digital health and Hicham Naim, the founder of Curated Health, also working at Takeda as Head of Strategy, Transformation & Innovation, Data Digitam & Technology. Speakers: Paul Simms, CEO of Impatient Health, Jennifer Butler, Chief Marketing Officer at Medisafe  Jessica Shull, Director of Digital Therapeutics at Vicore Pharma AB Christophe Jauquet, International keynote Speaker on making customers healthy & happy. www.facesofdigitalhe

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 provides medical aid to the countries most in need in the world. Since 1999, the Polish Medical Mission Association has been helping victims of wars, catastrophes and natural disasters. Their volunteers include doctors, paramedics, nurses, rehabilitators, as well as psychologists and medical analysts.  In this episode, speakers: Ewa Piekarska, President of the Board, Head of the Development Aid Program, Polish Medical Mission andMarta Kaczmarek, Coordinator of the EIT Health Ukraine Appeal explain the current needs for medical support, what supplies are in demand and more.  EIT Health Ukraine appeal is ongoing, so

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 discussion, you’ll hear more about the challenges related to rural health, how could care be brought to the community instead of patients needing to travel two to five hours for a 15 minutes visit, and more. www.facesofdigitalhealth.com

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. In the future, we might discover biomarkers in voice. After all, all the characteristics of voice - how loud or how quiet we speak, what tone do we use, how fast or slow we talk - all these characteristics probably have a correlation with something. But what about starting with something much simpler? Analysing voice recordings that already exist? US company Authenticx listens, analyzes, and activates customer voices. The AI-based software analyzes millions of conversations patients have with customer support agents through phone calls or emails. By analysing these conversations, it unveils recurring trends that heal

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 that optimism is the hope that we can bring access to healthcare to everyone in the world, that we can beat cancer and cure diseases such as diabetes or Alzheimer’s. That vision is important because healthcare innovation is not for the faint-hearted and as health indicators show, currently, life expectancy and health are worsening across the world, says co-founder and president of Startup Health Unity Stoakes. The market is maturing, he says, which is also seen in the number of companies that attract investments. The total amount of investments has been increasing for several years, but th number of companies that a

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 of healthcare and social care in the UK and Hassan’s experience with countries across the world. Which innovations are reasonable to implement in healthcare today? And which technologies are currently not ready for prime time just yet. You might be surprised by Hassan’s opinion.  Read an excerpt:

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 digital health innovation learn from the mindset present in oncology development.  Sean Khozin is the CEO of CancerLinQ, a non-profit health technology company focused on improving quality of care and health outcomes for all patients with cancer. He was the Global Head of Data Strategy and Data Science Innovation at Johnson & Johnson, before that he co-founded Hello Health, a technology company focused on developing integrated telemedicine, point-of-care data visualization, and advanced analytical systems for optimizing patient care and clinical research. He was also the Founding director of a digital health incubator

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 the end, is also to find an investor you like as a person. This will be crucial for the investor-startup relationship to survive once things get tough,” he says.  And it does get tough. As mentioned by Kei W. Mueller, he talked to over 90 investors with very limited success because the solution Ebenbuild is creating is so forward-thinking. In this episode you will hear:  About a mental health app that world with hospitals to give patients timely support after discharge and prevent to early readmissions,  A startup improving mechanical ventilation with the help of digital twins,  How can immunotherapy production be

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 clinician or telemedicine provider, please contact Health Tech Without Borders: https://www.healthtechwithoutborders.org/ukraine-telehealth-relief If you’re a medical device manufacturer or have the ability to donate medical equipment, EIT Health is facilitating the supply of medical equipment to Ukraine. EIT Health has partnered with the Polish Medical Mission, a leading humanitarian organisation working with healthcare professionals on the border of Ukraine. If you are an organisation with the ability to donate and ship any of the medical equipment please complete the form on EIT Health’s website: https://eithealth.eu/

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 episode, you’re going to hear a little bit more about that and the openEHR standard specification. I was joined by Hanna Pohjonen, eHealth management consultant and founder at Rosaldo Oy. Hanna has worked across the world, as a consultant in various regional and national eHealth projects in 31 different countries across Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia. She consults on healthcare information systems and IT architectures, vendor-neutral archiving, data sharing, and more. In her past, she also represented Finland in eHealth matters in the European Commission. In this discussion, you will hear a little bi

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 a decade. He spent 3 months in a nursing home to grasp the reality and problems of this kind of environment before he built Call9 - a health technology company that provided telemedicine for nursing home residents. In this discussion, we talked about design in healthcare. What is human.centered design? How to ask questions in your user research? What are the main mistakes innovators make?    More episodes and recaps: www.facesofdigitalhealth.com Leave a rating or a review: www.lovethepodcast.com/facesofdigitalhealth ****Sponsor mentioned in the episode*** Master E-networking live course on Maven. In ten days, you’l

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 look like? Tune in to the discussion with Julia Hoxha co-founder and CEO of Zana - a healthcare startup that helps organisations to build artificially intelligent voice and chatbot solutions. Julia’s background is in computer science with a heavy focus in machine learning and particularly in conversational AI, which is also the core technology of Zana. We discussed the latest trends in the use of voice in healthcare and how far beyond scheduling appointments with the help of Alexa have we come by 2022.  This episode is supported by EiT Health Germany, which is one of eight Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs) cur

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 does cultural diversity amplify innovation and how is Alliance Care Technologies, the company she is the CEO of, using best available technologies to optimize care and offer clinicians tools for better care, without turning them into data clerks. Enjoy the show and also tune in to the previous episode with a perspective of Zaid Tabet - healthcare executive who has been living in the Middle East for a decade and worked with government and private organizations to advance healthcare operations, processes, policies and regulations to promote digital healthcare adoption and use. Enjoy the show and go to www.facesofdigitalh