DigitalHealth.London Insider

The Week – 13^th – 17^th June,

Starting back to front, my week ended very positively with the Friday’s announcement during Simon Stevens’ keynote speech at NHS Confed, that as of April 2017, a Technology Tariff will be available to encourage the take up of new technology and devices by providers. Bidding starts from July, and is hoped will see for the ‘winners’ a reduced need to knock on the doors of multiple commissioners and provider organisations. This is extremely positive news for DH.L, with its remit to accelerate the commercialisation and adoption of digital health solutions across the NHS. Innovations such as AliveCor, myCOPD, and Patient’s Know Best were also either explicitly mentioned or presented.

What are the important ingredients to “realising the potential of Digital Health by influencing behaviour change?” Dr Priya Agrawal, Mark Duman, Andrew Thompson and Guy Yeoman, certainly offered some fruitful perspectives on this at this year’s FT Digital Health Summit on the 16^th June. We heard from the panel, “patients disrupting the health system”, “reverse innovation”, and “partnering with the patient”. It was refreshing to hear from Guy Yeoman a plea for industry to pull together to create one solution that the patient wants rather than adding to the fragmentation that already exists, as the challenge is too great for any one organisation to tackle on its own. Even Pharma struggles to scale good solutions.

It was recognised by both Chris Moore, Partner at EY, and Guy that our regulators don’t understand consumers and would like to talk to industry more. I’m excited at the prospect for DH.L to be able to support our regulators NICE and MHRA in this. Later that morning our very own Board members Sarah Haywood and Charles Lowe also provided great panel contributions on the topics of interoperability and regulation. All in all an interesting conference (although I could only attend the morning sessions), with stellar industry focus, but which lacked any significant demand side insight or patient & citizen voice.

I met two really interesting companies this week. The first- Healthy.io founded by Yonatan Adiri, an impressive entrepreneur, who was the first ever CTO for the President of Israel. Healthy.io has the potential to disrupt urine tests, by enabling them to be carried out in the home by the patient and interpreted using their CE marked proprietary scanning technology via the smartphone. Achieving cost efficiencies, improved access to diagnostic testing and a reduction in delayed diagnosis. Opportunities for impact include Pregnancy and Chronic Kidney Disease.

The second company I met was Healthera which has created an app to drive improved medication adherence, which is available to download on iTunes. It’s still relatively early days for Healthera, but the roadmap is interesting. As Medicines Optimisation continues to be a national agenda priority for the AHSN Network across England, tools that can successfully help in improving medication adherence and reducing waste, whilst improving outcomes, are being sought after. Healthera cleverly relies on the scanning of a unique QR code that is generated on the label when dispensing a prescription, and enables the patient to be receive reminders and provides a means for them to report side effects and communicate directly with their Community Pharmacist.

Next week, I’ll report back some insights from London Tech Week – in particular ‘How to be successful with the NHS?’ @LDNTechWeek

Yinka Makinde

@YMakinde1