South America is a large market, with great potential from the language perspective, since Spanish is the official language in most countries, except for Brazil. But what are the specifics of the region? In this episode Santiago Troncar, the founder of Future Docs Latin America, shares his insights on healthcare digitalization in Argentina. He discusses the strengths and challenges of the healthcare system, including the high level of human and software resources, but also the economic crisis an...
May 26, 2023•28 min•Season 9Ep. 263
Access to mental health services wasn’t great before the pandemic. Then two things happened: the need for mental health services increased. But so has access to telemedicine providers of mental health support. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) enabled flexibilities regarding the prescription of controlled medications. In 2020, the Food and Drug Administration announced a pandemic enforcement policy allowing mental health app developers to release certain treatment products without seekin...
May 18, 2023•55 min•Season 9Ep. 263
After a series about digital health in the APAC region, this is the first episode about healthcare and digital health in South America. Speaker: Peruvian clinician and innovator Jhonatan Bringas Dimitriades, MD. Jhonatan is based in the Netherlands, and worked across continents as an MD and executive at various tech companies. Discussed topics: The state of healthcare digitalization in Peru and other countries in Latin America. Opportunities and challenges for startups working with public hospit...
May 13, 2023•31 min•Season 9Ep. 261
Women's Health has increasingly garnered attention, with growing research, investments, and discussions surrounding the topic. Although overall digital health investments experienced a decline last year compared to previous years, the proportion of funds allocated to femtech within the digital health budget has seen an upward trend. However, there is still significant progress to be made. Women's health encompasses more than just pregnancy care, breast and ovarian cancer, or fertility. It also i...
May 07, 2023•50 min•Season 9Ep. 260
In South Korea, life expectancy at birth was 82.7 years in 2017, higher than the OECD average of 80.8. At the moment, Korea has one of the youngest populations among OECD countries, with only 13.8% aged 65 or over. This is expected to increase considerably in the next decades. At HIMSS 2023 in Chicago Mira Kang Vice Chief Medical Information Officer at the Samsung Medical Center in South Korea explained why a country that is an IT powerhouse and has fast-speed internet is widely available, isn't...
Apr 30, 2023•15 min•Season 9Ep. 254
This is the third episode in a series of discussions about digital health and healthcare in the APAC region. In this episode, Beth Ann Lopez, a Co-founder and CEO at Docosan, a healthcare marketplace that aims to make it effortless to access healthcare and help find a doctor who is available in Vietnam, talks about the state of healthcare in Vietnam, how did she identify the need for easier search and access to healthcare providers, how is Docosan vetting clinicians on the platform, how to start...
Apr 23, 2023•50 min•Season 9Ep. 258
This is the second episode in the Digital health in APAC Series. The first episode featured Farid Bidgoli, GM for Roche in Thailand, who discussed what is Roche looking into in Thailand when it comes to digital health. In this episode, the focus is on China. Ruby Wang, former Head of Health for the UK Government in China at the British Embassy Beijing; Adviser on Health Policy for the United Nations Resident Coordinator’s Office in China, who today works as a doctor in the NHS and a consultant t...
Apr 13, 2023•55 min•Season 9Ep. 254
This is the first episode in the series of discussions about healthcare and digital health in the APAC Region. In this episode Farid Bidgoli, General Manager for Roche in Thailand and neighboring countries. Farid talked about the healthcare system situation in Thailand, the state of digital health technologies, what kind of solutions Roche is keeping an eye on and more. The upcoming episodes feature: Ruby Wang, health and life science consultant, former Head of Health for the UK Government in Ch...
Apr 08, 2023•40 min•Season 9Ep. 256
After an intense race in AI development lighted by the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, two important things happened in the last week of March 2023: Over 1000 tech workers, such as Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX, Steve Wozniak, Co-founder of Apple, Yoshua Bengio, Founder and Scientific Director at Mila, Turing Prize winner and professor at University of Montreal, Stuart Russell, Berkeley, Professor of Computer Science, director of the Center for Intelligent Systems, and co-au...
Mar 30, 2023•19 min•Season 9Ep. 255
Healthcare is facing challenges on all fronts. WHO estimates a projected shortfall of 10 million health workers by 2030, mostly in low- and lower-middle-income countries. Countries at all levels of socioeconomic development face, to varying degrees, difficulties in the education, employment, deployment, retention, and performance of their workforce. Several other factors, such as the aging population and the rising demand for healthcare services, put healthcare systems under pressure to change a...
Mar 20, 2023•40 min•Season 9Ep. 254
One of the biggest global challenges in healthcare at the moment is the workforce crisis. Workforce shortages are not related to the number of people that get trained for healthcare professionals but the working conditions that they need to operate under. In today’s episode, we will look at a good practice related to nursing organizations in the community of the Netherlands. I spoke with Thijs de Blok, CEO of Buurtzorg International - an organization of 15.000 nurses that work in self-managing t...
Mar 10, 2023•55 min•Season 9Ep. 245
After a series of discussions about healthcare data in the US, we’re now moving to insights and good practices in the Netherlands. The Netherlands has roughly 17 million people. As you will hear, its healthcare is highly digitalized with high digital literacy. You will hear a short panel discussion that was recorded at mHealth Israel in Tel Aviv. Corne Mulders – CIO University Medical Center Utrecht Simon Vermeer – CIO Erasmus University Medical Center (Erasmus MC Rotterdam) Paul Hillman – CIO M...
Mar 04, 2023•23 min•Season 9Ep. 252
This is the fifth and last episode of the Healthcare Data in the US series. In the first one, Arif Nathoo - CEO and co-founder of Komodo Health, described how the company is planning to capture and de-identify every encounter patients have with the US healthcare system. The second episode featured Phil Lindemann, VP of Business Intelligence at Epic, and Epic’s Clinical Informaticist Dave Little, who talked about Epic Cosmos - a database of EHR data from 178 million patients. In the third episode...
Feb 23, 2023•48 min•Season 9Ep. 218
Electronic health records and digital data gathering have now been around long enough that the focus has shifted from gathering to using the data for research, AI development, and clinical decision support systems. Various companies are trying to build solutions to help clinicians navigate care, and workflows, and have the right information in front of them to make decisions fast without losing time searching through the whole patient’s record. This is the fourth episode in the series about heal...
Feb 16, 2023•46 min•Season 9Ep. 250
This is the third episode in a series of discussions about healthcare data challenges and data management practices in the US. One thing is clear to everybody: regardless of the efforts, patient data is still scattered around in different organizations. In the first episode, you can listen to a discussion with the CEO and co-founder of Komodo Health, Arif Nathoo. Komodo Health currently has some part of the healthcare data of 330 million people in the US. One of the leading providers of electron...
Feb 10, 2023•29 min•Season 9Ep. 249
If you work in healthcare IT, you must have heard the name Epic. Epic is a renowned EHR provider, that covers around a third of the US healthcare market. In 2019, Epic launched Cosmos, a special program for data mining of patient records data gathered in Epic systems. Today, Epic Cosmos, which was built to enable easier clinical research for contributing Epic customers, contains over 178 million patient records from over 6.5 billion encounters, representing patients in all 50 states. In this epi...
Feb 03, 2023•52 min•Season 9Ep. 248
The words healthcare data carry many associations: from frustrations around data interoperability, outrage about the value and monetization of healthcare data, anger due to poor access to medical records by patients, and we could go on. In the next few episodes, you will hear a little bit more about healthcare data management in the US healthcare system. We’re starting with a discussion recorded at HLTH 2022, where Arif Nathoo - CEO and Co-founder of Komodo Health describes how the company plans...
Jan 26, 2023•25 min•Season 9Ep. 247
This episode is the last on in the series of three discussions about natural language processing in healthcare. In the first episode, I discussed the state of symptom checkers with Jeff Cutler, CCO of Ada Health - the leading symptom-checking provider. In the second episode, CEO of Suki, Punit Singh Soni, explained where voice technology is today in helping doctors better manage their medical records and notes taking. And today’s discussion will give you a comment and critical perspective on usi...
Jan 19, 2023•51 min•Season 9Ep. 246
The promise of voice is great: doctors speak to their patients, while their words get correctly transcribed, interpreted and recorded in a structured way in a clinical system. No more long hours spent on typing clinical notes on the computer. While this may seem futuristic, it’s actually already in use in some places. At HLTH in November, I spoke with Punit Singh Sonu, CEO of Suki, which provides doctors with an AI-powered voice assistant for healthcare designed to save doctors time and energy. ...
Jan 12, 2023•26 min•Season 9Ep. 245
ChatGPT has been entertaining and amazing the world in the last month, and there’s no shortage of ideas and new inspiration about what AI could do for healthcare. In a short series of three episodes, we will touch upon this topic from three angles: will first take a look at the state of symptom checkers and their accuracy today, the development and state of voice tech and natural language processing for structuring data, and end with a comment on ChatGPT, chatbots and Google’s recently released ...
Jan 05, 2023•27 min•Season 9Ep. 244
We tend to be very good at overestimating what can happen in a year and underestimating what can happen in a decade. At the last mHealth Israel Conference in Tel Aviv, Mark Coticchia, who is the Innovation, Technology Commercialization, and Venture Development Leader at Baptist Health Innovations, shared his prediction about healthcare systems and healthcare delivery in the US in 2033. Transcript: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/mark-coticchia-baptist-health Leave a rating or review: w...
Jan 01, 2023•17 min•Season 9Ep. 244
This episode is the second about the evolution of mental health companies. In the previous episode, you could listen to Katie Di Perna Cook - SVP of Partnerships at Headspace Health, and today, we’re continuing the topic with Luke Hejl, CEO of TimelyMD, the leading virtual health and well-being solution for college students, CCO of Iris Telehealth, a leading provider of telepsychiatry services for health systems and community health centers across the U.S.. Luke and Michael talked about the stat...
Dec 26, 2022•34 min•Season 9Ep. 242
The pandemic has significantly increased the need for mental healthcare and destigmatized discussing well-being and mental health issues in everyday conversation. Unfortunately, the number of quality providers of mental health services is still much lower than the demand, and the number of people that are seeking help is rising. At HLTH or Health conference, which took place in November in Las Vegas, I spoke with representatives of 3 mental health-focused companies based in the US. TimelyMD is t...
Dec 21, 2022•25 min•Season 9Ep. 241
If someone told you to get an eye exam, would you associate that with a virtual reality headset? It might be where ophthalmology diagnostics will end up in the near future. Compared to the existing diagnostics tools, a VR approach is much more portable and hence accessible. The Swiss company PeriVision is using AI and VR to enable more efficient workflows and deeper clinical insights to manage eye diseases better. I spoke with the co-founder and CEO of Perivision, Patrick Kessel. Prior to joinin...
Dec 15, 2022•30 min•Season 8Ep. 240
Last year, one of the key buzzwords in healthcare was virtual care; in 2020 it was probably telemedicine. In 2019 it was AI, in 2017 and 2018, it was blockchain in interoperability. There are many others of course, and many of these terms are still popular today. It seems, though, that the one term that got pushed most in the background, is blockchain. And that’s a good thing, says John Bass, Founder & CEO of Hashed Industries (dba Hashed Health), a healthcare-focused venture studio. John is...
Dec 08, 2022•17 min•Season 9Ep. 239
The European Health Data Space is supposed to be implemented in a bit more than two years, by 2025. Two goals are at the forefront: to create the infrastructure for a European health data pool for researchers and innovators, and secondly, to enable patients to pick up their medications outside their home country and give doctors across Europe access to their patient information, if in need of medical care while abroad in Europe. On 18 November, EIT Health Germany-Switzerland and EIT Health Spain...
Nov 30, 2022•33 min•Season 8Ep. 238
Nurses play a key role in patient care, but their contribution to patient outcomes is often undervalued and underappreciated. It took a pandemic to create a major shift in their job opportunities and power to negotiate. Many nurses left the profession entirely, others switched to better-paid travel or agency jobs. The pandemic is settling down so the question debated in today’s episode, is what is the position the nurses are in today? You will hear from: Rebecca Love, Thought Leader on Nurse Inn...
Nov 24, 2022•50 min•Season 9Ep. 237
Between 13 and 16 November, HLTH, the largest digital health conference with over 9000 attendees, took place in Las Vegas. Over 400 speakers discussed the current trends and challenges in the industry. This short episode recaps some of the discussed topics - investment trends, holistic healthcare: food as medicine, digital therapeutics, mental health trends, telemedicine decline, patient experience as a determinant of care, health disparities and more. Speakers: Smriti Kirubanandan, Healthcare S...
Nov 18, 2022•13 min•Season 9Ep. 231
Finn Partners and Galen growth Asia partnered for a global overview of the digital health investment landscape. More than 200M data points from more than 12,000 digital health ventures worldwide were taken into account when assessing the state of the industry. In this short discussion, the CEO of Galen Growth Asia Julien de Salaberry, explained the key findings from the report, the state of digital health in China and expectations from next year. Investment trends globally: - In the first 9 mont...
Nov 15, 2022•12 min•Season 9Ep. 235
For new ideas and solutions to reach the market, startup founders need to find the right partners that are willing to listen to them and take their ideas one step further. Established in 2015, the Health Innovation Hub & Holding provides years of expert knowledge in innovation pathways, paving the way for better healthcare and a sustainable healthcare industry. The European organization better known under the name of Innovation in health has many programs in its portfolio. In this episode H...
Nov 10, 2022•36 min•Season 8Ep. 235
