Session III: Showcase: Digital Health Technology is Transforming Healthcare Delivery
Rick Williams, Former President, Boston Harvard Business School Alumni Association; Managing Director, William Advisory Partners
Debra Bass, Global CMO & U.S. President, Nuvo Cares
Rich Gliklich, Founder & CEO, OM1
David Mou, Co-founder and Chief Medical Officer, Valera Health; Psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital
The guests started the presentation and discussion by introducing how their companies use digital health technology to transform the healthcare delivery. Ms Bass, who was the first to address the issue, pointed out that the grueling routine of prenatal testing can be exhausting for pregnant women, especially high-risk ones. Obstetricians are also under greater pressure, which increases the chances of medical errors. This is where Nuvo Cares comes in. The company has designed a smart tool for real-time pregnancy monitoring so that expectant mothers can have a better understanding of the fetal development. The date is analyzed and processed by the medical staff in the center console when it is uploaded to the cloud. By doing so, pregnant women can get real-time care while reducing the frequency of going to hospital. Then, Dr. Mou pointed out that it takes 3 months to see a psychiatrist in Boston and patient information is not communicated among psychiatrist, family physician and psychotherapist, hence a conflict in designing therapy and prescribing medication for patients. That’s why he founded Valera Health. The company uses online software to guide people who seek psychotherapy and to refer them to therapists or psychiatrists based on their mental health status, providing timely care for the patients. Dr. Gliklich also emphasized the importance of real-time data and pointed out its three advantages. The first is to verify the value of new drugs and medical devices through massive data tests; second, personalized healthcare can be provided; and the last point is to enable information to be shared among the service providers, entities, doctors and patients. Mr. Deng said that this is the best time to develop AI. Driven by a serious shortage of radiologists in China, his company uses AI to process medical images, with an average of more than 30,000 images diagnosed every day. Good results have been obtained in the fields of fractures and lung cancer. Up to now, Infervision has many partners in the world.
Following the introduction to their companies, Mr. Williams asked the guests about the benefits of digital healthcare from their point of view. Dr. Gliklich argued that not only can it improve the quality of patients’ life as an most immediate effect but it also changes the way healthcare is delivered and how payers manage medical services. Based on her company’s experience, Ms. Bass also pointed out that virtualized management of pregnancy can promote better communication between expectant mothers and doctors, and form a pregnancy-centered linkage system. Mr. Deng added that AI image analysis has greatly improves efficiency and shortens the waiting time of patients. In Dr. Mou’s opinion, the guidance of online intelligent software can help patients avoid the embarrassing situation of meeting acquaintances in offline psychological consultation, not to mention that a huge amount of data can be used to enable scientific treatment to dispel patients’ doubts that the diagnosis is made intuitively by psychotherapists.
The guests gave a concise account of the audience’s concerns in the ensuing Q&A session. Mr. Deng pointed out that Infervision’s research and development of medical imaging technology is not to replace doctors in the hospital, but to play a supporting role in freeing them from repetitive and mechanical work. Dr. Mou believed that it is noteworthy how to encourage doctors to accept and gradually get used to new smart medical tools, and this should remain the direction of future efforts
Dr. Mou asked the guests how they, drawing on their own experience, persuade investors to obtain uninterrupted capital injection at the end of the discussion. All of them agreed that it takes long-term vision and goals at different stages with necessary confidence and clear planning. The answer also brought the session toward a successful conclusion. We look forward to the emergence of more innovative diagnostic and treatment methods in the healthcare industry, so that more people can benefit from the achievements of medical and technological progress.
