As if an IPO weren’t enough big news for Health Catalyst in 2019, the company also launched a brand-new life sciences business, basically setting forth a new solution for a completely new set of healthcare clients.
Sadiqa Mahmood, Senior VP for Medical Affairs, explains how Health Catalyst is building off their deep expertise analyzing clinical care data and adding to it the molecular data typically collected by pharma companies, biotechs, med device manufacturers, and even digital health companies in order to open up a new era of precision medicine.

The idea is to enable these innovators to better define patient cohorts for targeted therapies by creating a more robust data-set that integrates clinical measures.

Was this strategy part of Health Catalysts’ larger plan to go public? How have life sciences companies responded so far?

Sadiqa gives us some insight on Health Catalyst’s growth plans.

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.

As this area of pharmaceutical innovation matures ‘beyond the pill’ and ‘pill plus,’ what can players on both sides of the term sheet expect? Are things cooling off? Here to weigh in with the ‘state of play’ is Paul Tunnah, CEO of Pharmaphorum, a news site that has followed innovation in the pharmaceutical industry for ten years. In this interview from Frontiers Health, Tunnah talks trends and offers insight from his unique vantage point as an industry observer and analyst carefully watching both sides of the field.

Here are some of my key takeaways from Paul’s comments:

1. Pharma’s investment in digital health has gone from ‘patient facing’ to the ‘back end’

Tunnah takes us back five years, to a time when digital health was strictly regarded as a marketing communications play – a way to better engage patients to take their meds. Now, the boundaries have expanded, and big pharma is looking at digital health as a component of growing importance in their drug development process. From collecting and analyzing individualized patient data to reducing the cost of clinical trials, pharmaceutical companies have begun to literally let digital health startups inside and are evolving their own business processes to incorporate new tech solutions into the way they create their own IP.

2. Startups need to get good at regulatory, which means getting good at clinical validation

Sorry startups. You can forget saying that your tech will be out-of-date before a proper clinical trial can be conducted. Tunnah reminds us that the pharmaceutical industry is used to an average 10-year cycle for the development of their new products. What you’ll need to do to gain sufficient clinical validation to satisfy regulators will only take a couple years. If you’re not savvy at building an evidence base, find some help. As Tunnah says, “You gotta have evidence…that’s no different for digital health startups than it is for medicines.”

3. Pharma investors are starting to handle digital health startups the same way they handle biotech companies – carefully

There’s a shift happening in the way pharma investors are engaging digital health startups – and it’s in favor of the startups. As Tunnah puts it, pharma investors don’t want to accidentally ‘kill the golden goose,’ so they’re changing everything from the way they woo and negotiate with startups to how they finally establish their deal structures and reporting relationships to ensure that doesn’t happen.

Check out the full interview and find out more:

His company – which has coined the term ‘Digital Medicine’ to describe the new category of pharmaceuticals that combine drugs, devices, and digital applications – is one-year into a partnership with global pharma giant, Otsuka, to go ‘beyond the pill’ in terms of improving patient health outcomes.

I sat down with Thompson at Frontiers Health to get a breakdown of exactly what this new age in pharma means for those in the business, as well as for those who consume their products, the patients.

Remember how Apple changed the music industry with iTunes? Or how Google disrupted the advertising industry with search marketing? Or, how about how the banking industry shifted their attitudes toward consumers from ‘come see me on Bond Street’ to ‘go ahead, bank from your bedroom!’?

Thompson believes pharma companies are about to be disrupted in the same way – and talks about the change in mentality that’s needed in order to survive. IP is no longer just for molecules, but for processes and communication patterns…

So, how does a pharma company win in the digital revolution? Says Thompson,

The big prize in digital technology is not just that you make products and services that are much more tailored to individual consumers, but that you create vastly bigger and new business models…

Listen in on the interview to find out how.

Lucky for us, Dr. Rasu Shrestha, Chief Innovation Officer at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) – one of the most forward-thinking health systems in the US – can break the concept down.

It bears mention that UPMC is a unique hybrid healthcare business. Not only is it a very sizable hospital system (with 35 hospitals and more than 8,000 licensed beds) but it also provides health insurance and acts as a payer as well.

Rasu is a ‘hybrid’ too. In addition to being Chief Innovation Officer, he also leads UPMC Enterprises, the organization’s venture arm, so when he explains how the consumerization of healthcare will impact business models, payment models, and even the financing of healthcare risk, he’s speaking with all players in mind – including startups. What will it take for these newcomers to better serve healthcare consumers and usher in a new era of healthcare? Rasu offers his best advice.

What is the Consumerization of Healthcare? Dr. Rasu Shrestha, Chief Innovation Officer of University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC)

Who’s good at innovating in medical devices? What countries excel at consumer engagement? How about complex IT solutions? What do digital health startups – regardless of where they are from – need to know to become successful in the healthcare market?

While at Health 2.0 EU / HIMSS Europe in May, Zsuzsanna and I got to chat about health innovation worldwide, and what startup founders can do to attract the attention of big healthcare companies like Bayer. While startups who apply to their programs don’t necessarily need to be able to scale across borders, it is helpful for consumer-focused applications so Zsu ticks through some of the challenges startups need to overcome. What do most startups underestimate when it comes to taking their solution into a new country? You’ll be surprised at the answer.

What’s Trending in Digital Health? A Global Perspective from Bayer G4A’s Zsuzsanna Varga

Their current portfolio boasts more than 1,200 companies including big names like TalkDesk, Visual.ly, Canva, GrabTaxi. So, what are they doing in healthcare?

I caught up with Marvin Liao, a Partner at 500, during the ICEE Health Festival in Bucharest, Romania this summer to find out.

Listen in on our chat to find out if Marvin thinks digital therapeutics, mental health apps, and biotech have room to grow — and if Apple, Google, and Amazon really have the power to change the future of the health industry as we know it. Where in the world is he looking for the ‘next big thing’ to invest in? Find out what he says about the US and European markets and why he’s got his eye on Japan.

What’s Hot for Health Tech Investors? Marvin Liao from 500 Startups Weighs In