Thanks to the support of Healthware Group as global co-host and main sponsor, and to the conference chairman, Roberto Ascione, Frontiers Health is recognised as one of the leading global health innovation events and has become the epicentre of the digital health ecosystem.

The conference agenda, in its second year as a hybrid physical-virtual experience, will feature partnership opportunities to run custom breakout sessions, corporate events, keynote speakers, discussion panels, plenary sessions, challenges, breakout sessions and more.

Themes

This year’s conference will explore topics inspired by healthcare, including:

Digital Therapeutics
Patent protections, regulatory developments, reimbursement strategies, data protection, open-sourcing healthcare

Digital Transformation
R&D transformation, health insurance trends, consumerization of healthcare, mjedical on-demand models, the connected patient

Telehealth
Patient centricity, remote monitoring, beyond episodic care, mental telehealth, big data & AI

Funding & Scaling
SPAC strategies, digital health IPOs, investments

Tickets

Take advantage of the Early Bird discount to get your ticket – digital or in-person – to attend the most important global event dedicated to digital health innovation!

Buy your pass to keep up to date with the global conference

In a record time of one year, the company came from inception to closing a seed round in May, signing €100K of pre-orders, and now achieving CE certification for its products, enabling sales across Europe.

How it works

Following simple step-by-step instructions, users collect a finger-prick blood sample and ship it back to Revolab. The results are available within 24 hours on the app.

More than 30 different blood work tests are currently available such as complete blood count (CBC), glucose level, thyroid panels, STD tests or enzyme markers if you are at risk of cancer or other conditions. Special blood work tests, such as for vegans and vegetarians, are also available, which check for missing key nutrients.

Revolab’s story

The pandemic accelerated the adoption of self-tests allowing people to take charge of their own health, especially the ones with chronic diseases such as diabetes, high cholesterol or cancer predisposition, making Revolab’s value proposition even more compelling.

The company was founded by serial entrepreneur Ovidijus Kalinas and his spouse Jekaterina Kaliniene, CEO and CMO respectively. Jekaterina, previously served as CEO of Synlab Lithuania, a branch of one of Europe’s largest laboratory services companies.

The EIT Digital Venture Program enabled Revolab to develop their idea and prototype into a working product, validated by a network of partners and capable of attracting further investment.

The EIT Digital Venture Program is an outstanding program for early-stage startups. I recommend it to anyone who wishes to explore an idea and find the path forward, stated Revolab’s CEO, Ovidijus Kalinas.

The EIT Digital Venture Program takes you from idea to investment in less than a year. The ambitious trajectory takes entrepreneurs with a brilliant idea from concept to MVP, market validation and funding. Further benefits unlock with each milestone achieved.

This year, Frontiers has been a global Hybrid conference. In line with the “new normal” situation, the format of the 2020 edition has been hybrid, combining online global streaming together with offline events and activities held at hubs in multiple locations such as Italy, Germany, Finland, Spain, the USA, Switzerland and more.

It has been dedicated to digital health innovation in the context of the “new normal”, focusing on telemedicine, digital therapies, breakthrough technologies, patient-centricity, healthcare transformation and ecosystem development.

You can read the full live coverage on the pharmaphorum dedicated pages: Day 1 – Day 2

Livongo has been launched in 2014 and emerged from a previous company called EosHealth, invested in by its founder Glen Tullman’s VC firm 7wire Ventures.

The company began by focusing on diabetes but has since moved into other disease areas, including hypertension and mental health.

Today going public is really a branding event and we deal with 20 percent of the Fortune 500. Those organizations like to see that we’re stable and they like the transparency of public companies, Tullman said in an interview on CNBC. We also wanted to make sure we had a currency to use for acquisitions as we grow our whole person platform to serve more and more people with chronic conditions.

Read more about this news on cnbc.com

You’ve lived and worked in Asia, the US, and Europe. Can you tell us more about your experience?

I’ve been fortunate to work with great people to tackle challenging health problems in all these regions. Today as Managing Director for Taliossa, I serve as an independent board director for fast growth companies including health tech, I advise startups CEOs, and sometimes invest into their businesses.

My current activities build on my previous experiences, including being a founder and operator of multiple businesses, and my most recent corporate role in driving the health innovation agenda for MetLife Asia / LumenLab.

How do you prioritise which healthcare problems to solve?

My time at MetLife and LumenLab allowed me to spend significant time learning about customer problems in 11 countries in Asia Pacific including China, India, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia.

Through a lot of research and on the ground discovery, I not only connected with the vibrancy of the region, but also found the alignment of consumer interests, commercial opportunity, and viable product-market fit within three areas: cancer, human longevity – specifically in brain health, and population health models for the Asian market.

Ideally, the companies I collaborate with have core IP stemming from AI, Genomics, Blockchain, and smart devices to solve these challenges.
Although these problems are global in nature, I spend most of my time with an Asia-focused lens in how these solutions can be deployed at scale for this region.

Can you summarize the Health Tech opportunity for Asia for our readers who aren’t as familiar with the region?

Let me describe four facts to give some context.
First, let’s start with the geographic landscape. The Asia Pacific region is enormous and diverse: 4 plus billion people, 44 countries, and over 2 thousand languages.
It helps to think about the region as six main Hubs:

1. China and Hong Kong
2. The Indian subcontinent
3. Japan
4. The Korean Peninsula
5. Southeast Asia and Singapore
6. Australia and New Zealand

Each individual Hub has broad similarities including: economic stage of development ranging from developing to developed, cultural and lifestyle history, and climate. Keep in mind, there is still a lot of diversity within each Hub – this approach is simply a way to create a starting point for identifying and grouping commercial opportunities into relatively smaller areas. China alone is still nearly 1.4 billion people!

A second fact relevant to healthcare is how insurance works as compared to the West. Single payer government systems are more common. And the largest form of private insurance is a type of policy called critical illness. This insurance looks like a life insurance policy, except that the claims trigger is a debilitating health event such as getting diagnosed with cancer or losing eyesight or a limb to advanced diabetes.   The insurance claim is paid to a policy holder as a one-time payment instead of the insurance companies reimbursing each visit to the doctor’s office.

Third, the largest fast-growth technology companies are active participants in health innovation. In the US, we hear about the role that Amazon, Google, and Apple are taking. In Asia, the technology titans are Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (BAT). In Southeast Asia, Grab is also very active in linking insurance, health, and their ecosystem of offerings including ride-sharing together.
To bring this to life, let me briefly give you an example using a recent example from Tencent in China.

Through one of their affiliate digital insurance platforms called WeSure, insurance policy holders will now be given more choices to manage their cancer diagnosis. WeSure has 20 million policy holders as of Dec 2018 (after only 1 year of operations), and takes a user-centric approach to insurance. As a result, in addition to a one-time financial payout at the time of a cancer diagnosis, WeSure will leverage partners to support their policy holders through their cancer management phase with curated products and services.

The expected result is an improvement in survival rates. Other life insurers such as Prudential, MetLife, and PingAn area also pursuing this approach.
In the West, this might be expected from a company like CIGNA or Kaiser Permanente, but this is a new trend for private insurers in Asia.

My last area to discuss regarding the Asia opportunity is funding for startups. Many organisations track global healthcare investments in startups by Venture Capital Funds. A key insight from these reports is that Health Tech funding today in Asia is nearly the same as in the US as measured by USD invested into startups within a given year. Asia should surpass the US in the next 12-24 months. And this data doesn’t necessarily include family office funding which is more common in Asia than in the US.

That’s very helpful, especially given the case study. As Western investors and startups consider a focus on Asia, what unexpected challenges might they face?

Given how I focus on Population Health as one of my priorities, two topics come to mind, both related to data. For background, one company I’m partnering with to succeed in this space is CXA Group, which is driving towards improved health outcomes for employers and employees across Asia. I also recently penned an article on LinkedIn which talks about the influence of AI on population health models in China. Here’s a link.
Topic 1: Can your business get the “clean” data it needs?
Technology systems, especially AI models, function best when they have consistent and accurate data. While there are lots of sources of data in Asia, especially because of the mobile-first nature of the region, that doesn’t necessarily translate into usable healthcare data.
Startups entering this region should consider how the quality and access to data affects their business operations and even monetisation approach for each Hub.

Topic 2: How quickly can you adapt to the data management and privacy approach for each Hub? Or for each country?
As I mentioned earlier, splitting Asia Pacific into the six Hubs can help shape commercial strategies. Data management and privacy is one of the key differences between these regions. For example, data in China must stay in China. As a result, Alibaba and PingAn have developed cloud businesses as alternatives to AWS.
There are also questions on how to deal with consumer privacy and data. Europe is still the strictest region in the world with their approach to GDPR. This topic will likely require a country-by-country approach.
My final point on data is to explore opportunities to tap into government-sponsored data Sandbox programmes. These allow startups to experiment with local data in order to iterate and perfect a data management approach, which suits the needs of consumers, corporate partners, government, and the startup itself.

And last, you’ve recently published your debut fiction novel Comatose. What’s the link between Health Tech, lucid dreams, and your book?

Comatose is a fiction novel about lucid dreaming, which is when you not only know you are dreaming, but you control yourself in the dream. I’m a lucid dreamer, and it’s also how I wrote the book. I dreamt the end, overall plot, characters, and key scenes.
While the story is an exciting globe-trotting thriller that explains why we dream, it’s also a way for me to talk about the future of Health Tech. In the story, I integrated my views to describe the hospital of the future which includes how Artificial Intelligence, holograms, robotics, and smart devices can be used in patient management.
My research into the book and subsequent conversations with sleep, dream, and coma experts have made me realise how early we are in understanding these three areas. It’s like the knowledge we had about space travel in the 1950’s – we know some basics, but have lots of unanswered questions. As a result, I’m excited to play an active role in sleep science as a 4^th area of focus for me.

We managed to cover quite a lot! Thanks so much for your insights and time.

If you’d like to learn more about Tony, please visit his website at www.tonyestrella.com. You can also find his book in UK bookstores at Waterstones and Foyles, or on Amazon globally.

I had the opportunity to talk to Eugene Borukhovich, Bayer’s Global Head of Digital Health, during JP Morgan Healthcare Week in San Francisco, and here are the three big takeaways from our chat.

Digital therapeutics are shining light on the convoluted, complex mess of digital health

Eugene predicts that “within the next couple of years, ‘digital health’ as a term will disappear,” and calls out organizations like the Digital Therapeutics Alliance for their efforts to set standards around evidence-base and behavior modification so regulators and strategic investors alike can properly evaluate claims made by health tech startups.

As time goes on, it looks like efforts to ‘pharma-lize’ the ways startups take their solutions to market will increase, pushing them into more traditional go-to-market pathways that have familiar and comforting guidelines in place. As Eugene says,

Ultimately, what we say in my team, is that it’s about health in a digital world today.

Sounds like that’s true for both the products he’s seeking AND the way pharma is looking to bring them to market…

WATCH THE VIDEO INTERVIEW

These multi-hundred million [dollar] press releases are great to a certain extent, but what happened to the start-up style mentality?

When asked about Big Tech getting into Big Health, in the end, it seems, Eugene is in favor of the ‘Little Guy’ – or, at least, in their approach.

Don’t miss his comments about “cockiness in our healthcare industry” and how Big Tech is working around it by partnering up, but the salient point for startups is that big companies like Bayer still seem very much interested in buddying up with smaller businesses. It’s for all the same reasons as before: agility, the ability to iterate quickly, and the opportunity to do so within reasonable budgets.
Eugene offered this telling rhetorical musing:

Just because it’s a combination of two big giants… do you need to do $500 million? Or, do you give some… traction, milestone, [etc.]… to prove it, just like a start-up would?

In large organizations, transformation equals time, and… we don’t have time.

To me, says Eugene, the biggest challenge is actually landing these inside the organization.

He’s talking about novel health solutions – digital therapeutics or otherwise – after learning from previous G4A cycles. Culture, precedent, and years of market success loom large in big healthcare companies across the ecosystem, which is one reason why innovation inside them is so challenging.

Eugene says he’s… a big believer in a small team – even in large organizations – to take something by the cojones, and get shit done, and move it forward, and push the envelope from the bureaucracy and the process.

There’s a sense of urgency to ‘innovate or die’ in the face of the growing competition in the healthcare industry.

Back to this earlier conversation around whether it’s tech giants or other companies, he adds, it is a race to the speed of the organization. How quickly we learn and how quickly we make the decisions. Bottom line, that’s it.

There’s plenty more great insights and trend predictions where these came from, plus the juicy details behind how the G4A program itself has pivoted this year. Check out the full interview now.

When it comes to digital health, investors get a bird’s eye view and play a major role in steering the direction of the industry’s future. That is why many are stressing the importance of a diverse viewpoint for investors in an industry focused on bringing digital tools to the masses.

Traditionally this has been a challenge for the venture space, where women only account for 12.2 percent of digital health VC partners, according to a RockHealth report. While that percentage is higher than at the biggest VC firms in the US, where only 8 percent of partners are women, according to a MassChallenge and BCG report it still only accounts for a small percentage of the industry.

There are actually very few female investors in the health IT marketplace, and in investing in general. It’s a real shame because there is a trickle-down effect that results in female entrepreneurs having a more difficult time raising capital, Emma Cartmell, founder of Cartmell LLC. I do see some incredible female-led health tech companies that have affordable, high-impact solutions that I invest in and support, but they subsequently have a really hard time raising money from VCs.

However, the field is slowly starting to diversify. The number of female digital health VCs increased by 1.3 percentage points from 2017 to 2018. Researchers are also finding that hiring more women onto a VC team can be a smart money move — it is associated with improved fund returns and profitable exits, according to Harvard economists Paul Gompers and Silpa Kovvali.

Diversity makes sense

Digital health products are designed for a diverse group of individuals and settings, so having investors representing different perspectives is key, according to Luba Greenwood, who focuses on strategic business development and corporate ventures at Google Verily.

It is vital in digital health to have people not just on the venture side, but also on the boards and management of digital health companies, that come from different genders, economic backgrounds, ages and different perspectives. The best return on your investment is going to be in companies that are going to do that by working with payers, provider groups, pharmaceutical companies and diagnostic companies. Because you have such different types of companies, you need different perspectives as an investor. You need to understand how the consumer world works.

While gender is an important piece to this puzzle, Sarah Sossong principal at Flare Capital stressed the importance having diversity — not just in gender but in various backgrounds on a team. Women are not the only group underrepresented in the venture space: only 2 percent of VC investors are hispanic and just 1 percent are black, according to the Gompers and Kovvali report.

Venture capital is a really network-driven industry and so it really matters who you spend time with when you are hosting events, who you put on the stage, who you hire to be your partners, Megan Zweig, head of research at Rock Health, said. If your venture team and network reflect a certain demographic and maybe it’s overwhelmingly male, that is going to mean that the entrepreneurs that come to you are going to be predominately male, because they are going to see themselves in you and you are going to look at them and equate them to past founders and successes you had.

Zweig said it is important for VCs to include different voices in events and talking to people with different backgrounds.

Read the full article at mobihealthnews.com and stay tuned for our next story about woman in health. We will interview Graziella Bilotta, Managing Director of Healthware Ventures.

After conducting numerous more due diligence projects, a clear pattern emerged. Outstanding companies are defined by purpose – one that is fostered and communicated by the founders or the management team. I realised that a company that is driven by such purpose can access and use energy, enthusiasm and dynamics that other companies often find themselves lacking.

With our first notable digital health exit in Europe, I have come to believe that our ecosystem is becoming more stable and professional. Further, it is also good to see that more serial entrepreneurs and professional investors are joining the digital health scene.

Four years ago, when I joined a Venture Capital Fund that specialised in digital health as a Partner, I saw over 3,000 relevant companies in Europe. Back then, the European digital health scene was romantic and in its baby shoes. It was mainly filled with doctors who wanted to start their own company, or self-affected patients that wanted to build a service around their own problem. Very few of them had the experience of building up tech companies and positioning a company within the money streams of the healthcare system.

Watching the eco system develop in Europe I noted that the first companies that went bankrupt were the ones that mainly saw building up a healthcare company as solving a technological challenge, not a business challenge where you need to align yourself with the existing interests within the healthcare system. On the other hand, there were very few VCs and investors that wanted to touch digital health startups. Digital health startups were seen as too risky, very static and undynamic.

This attitude has changed since digital health companies in the US have begun producing trade sales and IPOs. In Berlin alone, we currently have 4 Venture Capital Funds and 2 company builders who raise funds for digital heath investments. Founders and investors of today’s startups are professionalising growth channels and B2B relations. Looking at companies that have successfully surpassed the Series A stage, it is notable that most of them are about digital access to doctors (KRY, Doctolib, DocPlanner, Min Doktor, Babylon Health, Push Doctor, Infermedica), consumerism (MEDIGO, mimi, Natural Cycles, Clue), health data (Symptoma, AdaHealth) or monitoring (dacadoo, Kaia Health). I am very happy for these entrepreneurial teams and expect them to find their strategic niche within the (digital) healthcare chain along the way.

Despite the professional approach of these growth companies, one of the major trends I have seen with digital health founders is that they focus solely on the patient benefits and neglect the business figures behind their purpose. They believe that being close to the end consumer and serving their needs will align stakeholders behind them and disrupt healthcare. Growth companies in digital health have to better-understand how to embed their value proposition towards the end customers within the existing healthcare stakeholder system too. Understanding the goals, KPIs and money streams of healthcare stakeholders is crucial for growth companies. In the digital health space of the future, competition will not take place between companies, but between alliances who have a connected value proposition.

As corporate growth investors, we have to look deeper into the financial substance of the companies. During our due diligence process, we have to assess if the company can establish itself long-term within the healthcare system. Having been an early stage VC, I understand that my colleagues need to focus more on the future potential and, more importantly, the next round’s valuation. Unfortunately, looking at a lot of Series A companies I have come to the conclusion that being purpose-only, or saying how many lives will be saved through the product/service, is not enough.

During growth, investing smart money is good, but what is more important for post-Series B investments is access. Scaling in healthcare is different to most other industries. Access to customers, stakeholders and, most importantly, data is key. This element to success can be provided by deep partnerships built on mutual trust and alignment of incentives. Corporate investments are a highly effective tool for cementing partnerships between key players in the healthcare system and innovative startups. When strategic priorities are aligned, such corporates provide access to a range of stakeholders that startups would otherwise have trouble reaching.

In contrast to the holy grail of MedTech, being non-invasive blood sugar monitoring, I believe that in digital health the holy grail lies with algorithms. For instance, startups like Predemtec are using their data for early detection of dementia patients. Detecting and predicting the onset of dementia or Alzheimer patients is crucial. Proactive treatment can transform the lives of patients, and the collection of data can further our research and work towards curing the disease, instead of just reactively treating or managing it. As for what is probably biggest blindspot in medicine, Symptoma has raised the bar for this field, providing the first and only viable deep-data solution. Their search algorithms analyse millions of medical publications and empower doctors to diagnose even rare diseases, based on symptoms, age and sex.

Last month, at a digital health startup competition, there were more investors and corporates in the room than startups. Hopefully this new ratio will push digital health founders to not only pitch the purpose of their offering, but also show a financial business opportunity. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see how investors want to differentiate to attract good deals. At the moment, competition among VCs favours digital health entrepreneurs. Therefore we, as VCs, need to re-evaluate our value proposition as well, so that we can participate on the best deals. Watching the ecosystem develop over the past 5 years, digital health is one of the greatest opportunities available to combine making a meaningful impact with personal economic goals. The opportunities are there for those who understand that purpose alone is not enough – that financial opportunities are one of the key drivers that attract the capital injections needed to undertake the company’s purpose.