NOVEMBER 2020
www.ciolook.com
The 10 Most Innovative
HEALTHCARE Companies in 2020
New Horizons Evolving Future Of The Biopharmaceutical Industry
Society of Physician Entrepreneurs ARLEN MEYERS, MD, MBA Transforming Healthcare by Entrepreneurship
For the Ultimate End-user Experience
EDITOR’S NOTE A Lesson to Learn
T
he capabilities of the Healthcare Industry have truly tested in the course the COVID-19 Pandemic. The whole world has brought to a standstill due to the instant spread of the virus. On this situation, health leaders are forced to ďŹ nd new ways and the prospect of technological advancement which can give the healthcare industry an opportunity and growth. The major issue has been noticed during the Pandemic is undermanned or under-equipped health staff. The intensity of the virus has left many health institutes with less than the required resources to help patients. One more related issue faced mainly by urban health hospitals is overpopulation. Patients who are suffering with other medical problems will also see delays in their care journeys. For future, the healthcare industry should also prepare for the long-term impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic. During the pandemic the necessity of virtual health care services has revealed. Services such as Virtual monitoring also called Remote Physiological Monitoring (RPM). The contagious nature of COVID-19 virus has forced many hospitals to close their gates to non-COVID patients. Without this technology, patients with chronic or other deadly conditions would lose access to essential healthcare. However, healthcare providers who utilize a virtual telemedicine platform are still able to connect with their patients.
This edition, The 10 Most Innovative Healthcare Companies in 2020 features some prominent healthcare companies which are dedicated to bring improvement in the sector with their exemplary services and solutions. On the cover of this edition, we have Goliath Technologies, which offers end user experience monitoring and troubleshooting software, with embedded intelligence and automation, that enables IT pros to anticipate, troubleshoot, and document performance issues regardless of where workloads, applications or users are located. Other leading companies that has been featured, include, Alertgy, provides the ďŹ rst noninvasive wearable continuous glucose monitor and alert system to actually measure true blood glucose; ConnectWell, an independent and trusted provider of health and wellness content for its partners to fully engage their population in their health and well-being. We hope you enjoy reading this edition as much as we did while curating it for you.
Abhishaj Sajeev abhishaj@ciolook.com
COVER STORY
10
Goliath Technologies
For the Ultimate End-user Experience
ARTICLE
40
22
Society of Physician Entrepreneurs
New Horizons
ARLEN MEYERS, MD, MBA Transforming Healthcare by Entrepreneurship
Evolving Future Of The Biopharmaceutical Industry
CONTENTS
18 Alertgy Revolutionizing the Diagnostic Industry
26 Amy Heymans Innovative Design Inspired by Empathy
30 ConnectWell A Leading Provider of Digital Health and Wellness Content
36 Dr Joanne M. Hackett Enabling a Better Quality of Life for Everyone
46 Elena Kyria Finding Exceptional Talent
Elrna KyriaJahanara (Jan) Miotto
A Valuable Asset in the Pharmaceutical Industry
48
Abhishaj Sajeev Editor-in-Chief
CONTENT
Senior Editor Alan Swann Executive Editors Rohit Chaturvedi Alex Spellman
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November, 2020
Company Name
Featuring
Brief
Alertgy alertgy.com
Marc E. Rippen President & Founder
Alertgy is committed to transforming how we monitor blood sugar to improve the lives of diabetics and, in the future, help people prevent diabetes.
ConnectWell connectwell.com
Andrea Bloom Founder & CEO
ConnectWell is an independent and trusted provider of health and wellness content for its partners to fully engage their population in their health and well-being.
Elemed elemed.eu
Elena Kyriacou Founder
Elemed recruits exceptional people that solve regulatory and compliance problems, so patients all over the world can have access to safe, innovative and life-changing Medical Devices.
Genomics England genomicsengland. co.uk
Dr. Joanne M. Hackett CCO
Genomics is a ground-breaking area of medicine that uses unique genetic code to help diagnose, treat and prevent illnesses.
Goliath Technologies LP goliathtechnolog ies.com
Thomas Charlton Chairman & CEO
Goliath Technologies has been instrumental in changing the way the health care industry perceived health IT.
LifeScan lifescan.com
Valerie Asbury President & CEO
LifeScan is a global leader in blood glucose monitoring innovation and digital health technology and has a vision to create a world without limits for people with diabetes and related conditions.
MadPow madpow.com
Amy Heymans Founder & Chief Experience Officer
Mad*Pow is a design agency that strives to help people improve their health and wellness, meet their financial goals, learn and connect.
Metrendalytics LLC metrendalytics.com
Jahanara (Jan) Miotto President
Metrendalytics Consulting is focused on helping companies develop highly customized and flexible business intelligence solutions.
Society of Physician Entrepreneurs sopenet.org
Arlen Meyers MD, MBA President & CEO
The Society of Physician Entrepreneurs is a global, non-profit, open biomedical and clinical innovation and entrepreneurship chapter network.
Wello wello.ca
Lori Casselman President & Chief Revenue Officer
Wello helps reduce employee absenteeism while increasing productivity, performance, engagement and job satisfaction.
Cover Story
Goliath Technologies
For the Ultimate End-user Experience
“Health systems that had one hundred telehealth visits a few months ago are now seeing thousands. This is a real opportunity for tech companies to serve ongoing patient care.” —Thomas Charlton Founder, Chairman & CEO Goliath Technologies
H
ealth care industries today rely heavily on information technology and give importance to excellent end-user experience. But this was not the case until the recent past. Health IT systems earlier operated on a minimalistic budget and hence delivering exceptional end-user experience used to be a Herculean task for IT professionals. Recognizing the hurdles, being part of a health IT system Thomas Charlton founded Goliath Technologies in 2010. Headquartered in Philadelphia (PA), the company has been instrumental in changing the way the health care industry perceived health IT. The company and its founder set a benchmark for many others to emulate and thrive in an ever-growing market and cater to an ever-growing demand. More than ever before, monitoring end-user experience in health care industry has assumed gigantic proportions today. We peek at the formation, transformation, success, and future plans of Goliath Technologies in an interview with its founder. In the following interview with CIO Look, Thomas share his thoughts and opinions on the current scenario within the healthcare industry and his company’s stronghold as well. What was the vision behind establishing Goliath Technologies? I was CEO of six venture-backed companies before I founded Goliath Technologies. Goliath was born out of my aspiration to grow a company from the ground floor. In order to start a company, you need to have a sizeable, addressable market where users are feeling real pain due to lack of a solution. I had seen the true struggle IT professionals were facing as technology elements and applications started moving to the cloud. At the same time, many legacy components and applications remained on-premises.
My vision was to build a company that would develop and sell purpose-built software to alleviate the pains IT professionals face when managing and supporting hybrid infrastructures – all while delivering an exceptional end-user experience. And this vision has been realized as Goliath Technologies. What made you choose the healthcare industry for your endeavors? I began my career in healthcare, working for U.S. Surgical and have always been familiar with the healthcare space. As I moved out West to San Francisco and into the technology sector I learned that all too often Health IT systems have half the budget and half the resources as their enterprise counterparts. And in Health IT, patient care ultimately swings in the balance if IT systems do not perform optimally. This is why in growing Goliath, though we are decidedly a cross-vertical solution, over years we added purpose-built functionality to focus on healthcare and improving end-user and clinician experience across all major EHR applications —Epic, Cerner, Allscripts and MEDITECH. How do solutions by Goliath add value to the Healthcare industry? In the products we developed for Health IT we made very deliberate decisions to add features that help our Health IT professionals address challenges that are unique to their situation. Specifically, we developed integration and support for the clinical and business applications that are critical to their end-users along with automation and embedded intelligence
We selected Goliath Technologies because their end-user experience monitoring and management supports Cerner and identifies systems degrading before physicians are impacted. We do over 15,000 Cerner application test launches per day. This early warning system coupled with enhanced performance data and analysis puts us in a better position to collaborate with Cerner to resolve issues. — Mike Nelson, Sr. VP, Strategic Services, Universal Health Services
that has the net effect of adding three full-time employees to their staff. Goliath believes in offering ‘proactive’ solutions. How does that create an advantage for the clients? With our embedded intelligence and automation, we can automatically identify any potential failure points, conditions, or IT elements that can negatively impact the end-user or clinician experience. We then create alerts that will proactively notify IT if any of these points create a poor end-user experience. This way IT can address issues before end-users are even impacted. For example, we work with a top 10 U.S. Health System with over 100 hospitals nationwide. Using Goliath, they were proactively alerted at 4:30 a.m. that their EHR system was unavailable. IT was able to quickly resolve the issue before most users started their day. By proactively alerting IT, this health system prevented
an outage for over 25,000 users and more importantly it had no impact on quality of patient care. Which is your flagship product/service that stands out and how? Goliath Technologies offers purpose-built modules for all the major EHR systems (Epic, Cerner, Allscripts, and MEDITECH). These modules provide an end-to-end view that enables Health IT to correlate data from enduser experience, the delivery infrastructure, and the EHR application to anticipate, troubleshoot, and document end-user experience issues. With the data provided, IT can prevent performance issues, quickly isolate root cause and resolve issues when they do occur, and finally document the results proving across management, other IT vendors and groups, and to end-users that permanent fix solutions have been implemented. How do you prepare yourself and the team to stay updated with the latest technologies? We stay in constant communication with our customers and partners to understand where shifts are occurring in the market and in their business. This is one reason why we have both technical and business partnerships with all the major EHR vendors. Also, I personally meet with CIOs and executives of these health systems regularly to understand what is driving their priorities and what are some of their top challenges. Our best product ideas have come directly from understanding the challenges our clients face and working collaboratively with them to solve with software.
What are going to be your future endeavors? This is a question that is difficult to answer in today’s environment. Based on conversations with our health system clients, we see an acceleration towards technical solutions that will enable the provisioning of healthcare remotely. Telehealth is one such example. Health systems that had one hundred telehealth visits a few months ago are now seeing thousands. This is a real opportunity for tech companies to serve ongoing patient care by advancing their remote enablement technology. As with any crisis, there will be opportunity created for those who have the vision, awareness, and capability to act. What according to you is the one takeaway from the COVID-19 pandemic? Reliable end-user experience is more critical than ever. For years, organizations and health systems have discussed making their applications always available from any location and any device. Those ahead of this vision were able to accelerate during this crisis. Those who had not yet started were scrambling as they saw their employees all begin to work remotely. No one can predict what work styles will look like on the other side of COVID-19, but one thing will remain constant: the focus on end-users and their workspaces. Enabling end-users to be effective and productive, regardless of where they work from and what device they use, will be critical to an organization’s survival.
Goliath helps find the true root cause of end-user experience performance problems by using data to identify what specific component is impacting the provider experience so it can be resolved quickly and provide a better overall user experience. —Chris Vernaci, VP & Partner, Cerner Corporation.
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Marc Rippen President & Founder Alertgy
A
s an effectual result of a traumatic personal experience of Marc Rippen, Alertgy was founded. Marc's wife Sue had a low blood sugar attack and was found nearly unresponsive. He saved her from a diabetic coma and understood that diabetics needed an automated glucose monitor and alert system that was practical, non-invasive, inexpensive, and easy to use.
A ProďŹ cient Leader The Founder and President of Alertgy Marc is an experienced and highly skilled technical engineer with over 30 years of experience. He has worked for multiple fortune 500 companies, Department of Defense (DOD), NASA, SOCOM, and DARPA commercializing dozens of ground-breaking and revolutionary technologies. He holds various degrees across multiple interrelated disciplines including: Microbiological Sciences and Immunology, Biophysics, Analytical Chemistry, Masters of Aeronautical Science, and Management of Engineering and Technology.
His wife's diabetic condition forced him to address a major unmet need for diabetics and their loved ones for a system that would automatically alert when blood glucose levels are too high or too low. This was the idea that led to the inception of Alertgy.
A Non-invasive & Inexpensive Solution Marc has always enjoyed helping people overcome technical problems where he could apply his 'out of the box' thinking skills to creatively solve their challenges and is doing the same through Alertgy.
Alertgy provides the ďŹ rst non-invasive wearable continuous glucose monitor and alert system to actually measure true blood glucose. It sets diabetics free from having to think about taking measurements
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Revolutionizing the Diagnostic Industry
by allowing for fully automated continuous monitoring with pre-set alerts for low or high glucose levels set by the user. The fact that one third of all hospital admissions from their Emergency Rooms are due to type 2 diabetics who are not compliant in managing their diabetes. Alertgy's solution can eliminate 80% of these events by providing an inexpensive automated means to drive compliance of diabetics by providing the necessary data to their health care and other caregivers to act upon.
“We are committed to transforming how we monitor blood sugar
Leveraging Technology
to improve the lives of
The medical device and diagnostic industry are constantly growing and changing with new technologies being introduced to the market all the time. Alertgy is entering a new era in medicine that will be significantly impacted in the incredible growth and breakthroughs in wearables, cloud based IoT sensor systems, application of AI 10, and digital health. Its technology can also be used to look for telltale signs of other disease states which will drive the application of wearables in remote and home-based applications.
diabetics and, in the future, help people prevent diabetes.”
Alertgy is engaged in attending technology conferences in the fields that impact its continuous development, in the area of IoT, Wearables, Digital Health and Diabetes. It also works with strategic partners that are
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| November 2020 |
recognized as leaders in the ďŹ eld and has a technical advisory board that provides the company with inputs to ensure it stays on top of things as much as possible.
not only a leader in diabetes care, but also diagnostics and monitoring for a plethora of diseases and ailments. Striving to Be an Industry Leader
A Potential Application Currently, Alertgy is focused on ďŹ rst bringing its technology to bear on the largest and most underserved diabetic population of over 400 million people that are type 2 diabetics around the world with a way to manage their disease easily, automatically, and effectively. To this end, the company will be pursuing an alert and surveillance application approval for this from the regulatory agencies throughout the world. Given that 1/3 of the world's entire population is borderline diabetics, the company can help them better manage their lifestyles to keep them from becoming diabetic.
COVID-19 has severely affected almost all of the world. While many businesses are struggling to tackle the crisis, Alertgy is taking advantage of change instead of ďŹ ghting it. According to the team at Alertgy, the major catalyst for change has been the COVID-19 crisis. The diabetes monitoring industry is behind the curve and is ripe to implement its technology to address a major unmet need in the mature market, a non-invasive, cost effective digitally enabled continuous blood glucose monitor and alert system. The millions of diabetics throughout the world need an easier and simpler way to manage and monitor their blood sugar, without the pain and hassle that today's products bring.
The team at Alertgy believes that in the future there is no limit to what its technology can provide in the way of monitoring and diagnostics. Published research indicates that Alertgy's technology has the potential to track other metabolites and cellular markers within the body for other diseases that could pave the way for the company to be a premier leader in diagnostic technology.
In the future, Alertgy believes it can reach new industries and customers by applying its patented technology to many other forms of diagnostics. Ironically, the detection of COVID virus is a potential application for Alertgy technology. Alertgy can become
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| November 2020 |
New Horizons
O
ver the coming years, we expect pharmaceutical industry models to be reshaped by some forces both from within and outside of the industry - that will demand present organizations to recognize shifting markets and figure out how they will compete in the changing market.
parameters and create personalized insights into the health of the patients. The availability of streamlined data and personalized AI can enable much precise well-being and actually real-time micro-interventions that will allow us to get ahead of illness and far ahead of catastrophic or chronic disease. By 2040, health is much more likely to revolve around preventing some illnesses from happening and curing others. Fewer people might have long-term conditions or chronic disabilities with a continued need for medicines to treat symptoms.
Biopharmaceutical companies will continue to evolve in new ways to treat and cure a variety of diseases. However, in the future actionable health insights, driven by artificial intelligence and big data analytics, can help doctors and patients to identify illness much quicker than the time we require today. In the first place, the newly invented vaccines and other early interventions due to technological advancements could prevent a greater number of illnesses from developing. Other diseases can be also prevented. Changes in how diseases are recognized, prevented, diagnosed, treated, or cured might lead to basically different business models for traditional pharmaceutical companies.
The few factors that may be the most important component of shaping the future of pharmaceutical industry can be prevention or recognition and early detection, streamlined or customized treatments, curative therapies, digital therapeutics, and precision intervention. Prevention and early detection: Vaccine and general improvements in wellness could help prevent illnesses, making treatment for some illnesses no longer essential. Progress in early detection will more likely enable interventions that halt diseases in the beginning stages before they progress to become more serious or chronic conditions.
The future of health that we will witness in the upcoming years will be much different from what we have now. Based on evolving technologies, we can be sure that digital transformation driven by big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and through such secure platforms will be key in leading this change. Unlike today, we can expect that care will be streamlined around the patients, rather than around the institutions that drive our current health care system.
Customized treatments: Personalised services in medicine driven by data-powered insights can effectively match patients with customized drug medicines or design therapies that will work for just a few people or even a specific person. More customized treatments will be the most important part of the pharmaceutical industry in the future.
In the next few years, streams of healthcare data, combined with data from a variety of other relevant resources will probably merge to create a multifaceted and highly personalized picture of the well-being of every patient. Many digital health organizations have already started to incorporate biosensors and software into devices that can create, gather, and integrate data. Advanced cognitive intensive technologies can be developed to analyze a precisely large set of
Curative therapies: As with prevention, treatments that cure the illnesses can decrease or eliminate the demand for some prescription medicines. Developing, marketing, and costing of these curative treatments may require the pharmaceutical sector to adopt new capabilities and strategies.
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EVOLVING FUTURE OF THE
BIOPHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY
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| November 2020 |
Amy Heymans Founder & Chief Experience OfďŹ cer Mad*Pow
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| November 2020 |
Mad*Pow
“
It’s an exciting time to be in design – our work has the potential to improve so many people’s lives.
AMY Heymans
Innovative Design Inspired by Empathy
T
he ‘care’ in ‘healthcare’ symbolizes the significance of ‘care and empathy’ in the ever-evolving healthcare sector. The inclusion of “care” as part of our health process has become an essential element of the changing healthcare ecosystem. Meet Amy Heymans, Founder & Chief Experience Officer at Mad*Pow. Because of her background in design, Amy understands the importance of empathy in the design process. She believes that design, along with bit of care, can help improve the human condition. Under her guidance, Mad*Pow has achieved many milestones in helping improve the healthcare ecosystem. Below is her story: Amy pursued a career in design because it requires a keen eye to look at things from a different perspective and find new ways to solve problems. Her expertise in web design, experience design and research helped her identify people’s needs and then use design to meet those needs. After working as a freelancer, Amy teamed up in 2000 with business partner Will Powley to start Mad*Pow. The company focused on making digital solutions more useful, usable, and desirable. Eventually, Mad*Pow extended its focus into innovation, service design, and behavior change design, which Amy believes is the next frontier in design. As Mad*Pow grew its client base, Amy developed a passion for using design to improve health experiences and had a desire to build a community around that passion. Amy’s passion motivated her to start the Health Experience Design (HXD) conference 10 years ago, then create the Center for Health Experience Design (CHXD) three years ago. Both the HXD conference and the Center draw participants from industries across the health ecosystem to share resources and collaborate on patient experience problems. Recently, Mad*Pow was
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“
acquired by Tech Mahindra, boosting the company’s ability to not just envision amazing experiences, but also bring them to life in a completely holistic way for its clients. Amy was inspired to pursue a career in design because she knew she could help improve lives on a large scale. Under her guidance, Mad*Pow worked across a variety of industries, but some experiences with early clients inspired Amy to put a larger focus on health and health care. As a result, Amy established a health practice, working with organizations across the ecosystem–from health tech, pharma, nonprofits, government agencies, retail, providers, and payers. “The community in health is so rich and diverse,” Amy says. She is inspired by the amount of empathy in this industry, and the shared purpose of driving toward better health and improved quality of life. Mad*Pow leverages strategic design and positive motivation to create innovative experiences and digital solutions that are good for people as well as for business. The company aligns business strategy with experience strategy by creating a path that puts empathy and the understanding of human behavior at the core of its clients’ operations. Human-centered design activities help the Mad*Pow team identify what motivates people, what they desire, and what should happen next as they interact with clients, their customers and other organizations. These insights fuel creative approaches that allow Mad*Pow to collectively envision new and exciting experiences. It leverages an in-depth understanding of behavior science to create products and services that help people achieve greater health and wellness. Mad*Pow identifies target behaviors for change, uncovers their underlying modifiable determinants, and draws on techniques best suited to shift behaviors into new patterns. It also designs and builds scalable, usable, and accessible digital solutions that deliver seamless and compelling experiences while producing measurable business results for clients. Mad*Pow brought empathy and patient centricity into the health care industry ethos before it was in the limelight. Now, 10 years later, empathy and patient centric-solutions are well known and embraced by the design and health communities. Amy founded the Health Experience Design (HXD) conference 10 years ago because there was an unmet need to bring the health and design communities together to share experiences and collaborate on solutions. The success of the HXD conferences spawned the Center for Health Experience Design (CHXD), a free online community where users can share information, continue learning and foster collaboration year-round. Amy has been able to create multistakeholder collaborations among organizations that are serving the same types of patients. For example, CHXD was able to connect government and non-profit organization with companies that want to collaborate on better solutions to address tough challenges. Amy believes, through empathy and collaboration, one can easily prevail in the intensely competitive health care sector. In business, and when it comes to delivering care, experiencing the same pain point again and again can feel defeating, like the problem is unsolvable. Amy’s goal as a leader is to see a problem from all sides, to inspire empathy in others, and to paint a picture of what is possible.
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Amy believes that business leaders need to involve all stakeholders who will be affected by a solution in the process of creating it. Businesses need to consider personal perspectives – the patient, doctors, caregivers, and families. Companies should not assume they know what’s valuable to the end-user, even if they are or were a practicing doctor or patient. In fact, that’s a handicap because they will automatically assume that their target audience thinks as they do. When business leaders engage with doctors and patients on a continuous basis, the solutions will become clear. They will come to understand what motivates people, how the solution fits in their ecosystem, how it can connect with existing resources, how data should flow in and out, and with which entities they need to cooperate. As volatile changes in technology can be witnessed daily, Amy prefers to set goals and keep pursuing them. She knows that reaching these goals is going to take time. Her stubbornness can be a positive thing, because it makes her diligent and helps her persevere to meet her goals; it drives her success. She reminds herself to consider, what does she really need? What does she want? She works hard to keep learning about herself and the business by reading and staying current on industry trends and standards. She is not afraid to create the resources she needs to succeed, even when they don’t exist yet, e.g., the CHXD, Mad*Pow’s Financial Experience Design (FXD) or HXD conferences. Amy states that the next evolution of health care is blending behavior science, motivational psychology, and public health frameworks with human-centered design, data science, and technology. And the beauty of human-centered design is that it’s interdisciplinary. Mad*Pow will continue exploring new frameworks to pull all the parts together in a way that will create the most impact for its clients. Yet, Amy still believes that Mad*Pow has some work to do to push things forward. Partnership with UC Berkeley School of Public Health Amy is proud, under Mad*Pow’s banner, to stimulate innovation industry wide by bringing together multi-stakeholder collaborations to address important challenges. For example, in 2018, Commonwealth wanted to better support lower-income employees who enroll in a high-deductible health plan (HDHP), so they set out to run a design and innovation challenge in partnership with Mad*Pow’s CHXD to grow awareness of this problem space and crowdsource novel solutions. A team of students from U.C. Berkeley’s Center for Health Technology won the top prize for their app called the “Plan Picker.” Plan Picker lets employees complete a questionnaire about medical use, financial assets, and risk tolerance; this information directs employees to the plan that best fits their health and financial needs, and even screens users for Medicaid eligibility. Post-enrollment support features within the app include educational videos, a deductible calculator, a prescription drug price checker, and a doctor visit copay estimator. “This kind of collaboration is the future of the health industry, and Mad*Pow takes pride in facilitating that collaboration,” says Amy.
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ConnectWell A Leading Provider of Digital Health and Wellness Content
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W
ith an intent to deliver an innovative wellness offering that combines proven science and practical methods to prevent and reverse chronic diseases related to lifestyle, ConnectWell was conceived. ConnectWell is an independent and trusted provider of health and wellness content for its partners to fully engage their population in their health and well-being. How it All Started The demands on the healthcare system have dramatically shifted from acute care to chronic care, given the steep rise in the prevalence of chronic disease. As chronic conditions are long-term health issues and often driven by lifestyle choices, people must get more involved in managing their care in order to maintain their health, believes Andrea Bloom the Founder and CEO of ConnectWell. As a child of a physician, Andrea's exposure to the field of healthcare from a very early age became a springboard for her career and passion for helping people achieve well-being. After receiving her BA from UC Berkeley, and MBA from Harvard Business School, Andrea started her career in healthcare at Johnson and Johnson's diabetes division in Silicon Valley. This is where she learned how people with type 2 diabetes can successfully manage their disease through healthy eating and increased physical activity.
prevent, delay, and reduce the severity of chronic diseases if they have ongoing access to a trusted, comprehensive source of information that engages them to be more proactive in preventing disease and adopting healthy habits. Observing these trends, Andrea created ConnectWell, and shifted her focus from disease management to wellness. To empower people in their health and well-being and incorporate healthy lifestyle habits into daily living, they need access to engaging, accurate, up-to-date, and expertly vetted health information. Andrea assembled a Scientific Advisory Board comprised of subject matter experts in different areas of wellness. She built a team of talented, experienced individuals with diverse backgrounds who could hit the ground running and work in an entrepreneurial and collaborative environment. Together they created and deployed consumer-oriented wellness programming in the areas of healthy eating, physical activity, stress management, sleep, and maternal health.
The Perfect Conjunction Andrea could see the digital revolution unfolding and that it would eventually hit the healthcare system – enabling the ability to scale health information for easy access, anytime and anywhere. In 2017 ConnectWell formed a partnership with the UC Berkeley School of Public Health to digitize and disseminate their vast collection of health and wellness publications. For 36 years, the UC Berkeley School of Public Health has been a pioneer in providing evidence-based wellness information. Combining ConnectWell's lifestylefocused content with UC Berkeley's condition management content was the perfect marriage to create a holistic consumer digital health experience. An Integrated Content Suite ConnectWell works with a broad array of healthcare providers, health engagement platforms, health device companies, benefit providers, and employers who license and
Andrea realized that many people were exposed to healthy lifestyle practices only after they were diagnosed, and sometimes only when they would see their doctor. Most people have an opportunity to
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Andrea says, “As part of the digital health ecosystem, we continue to meet innovative companies that we collaborate with to deploy our content in creative ways. We learn from each other and together build out platforms that scale health literacy and health engagement.”
integrate its content into their platforms and engage the people they serve in their health and well-being. These companies can now deliver on the promise of improving the health of those they serve by integrating the ConnectWell Content Suite as part of their services.
An Interactive Digital Health Offering The Content Suite has 3 areas that are complementary in supporting total health and well-being:
The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed how people prioritize and engage in their health and interact with the healthcare system. Underling health conditions have a major impact on how people fare if they get COVID-19. Virtual care models are key factors to engaging people in their health and well-being. Accessible, accurate, current, expertly vetted health information from a trusted source is critical so people can make informed health decisions.
Health & Wellness Digital Library: Extensive coverage of health, wellness, and disease topics from A to Z Wellness Initiatives: Wellness education with strategies and tools to help in the adoption of healthy lifestyle practices Healthy Recipe Collection: Healthy recipes that are tasty, easy to make, and made from whole foods and healthy ingredients
ConnectWell is launching an interactive digital health offering that was co-developed with Outgrow, an
As English is not always the primary language for many people across the U.S., ConnectWell has made content available in all of the “threshold” languages recommended by Medicare and Medicaid. This enables customers to activate “underserved” communities. Content is optimized for all device screen sizes so that whether an end user is using a computer at home or a smartphone on-the-go, they can access content. Furthermore, UCTV video presentations from University of California experts are woven throughout the Content Suite to enhance the user experience. Videos have subtitles available in dozens of languages enabling a wider reach. ConnectWell's multi-lingual capabilities have enabled international expansion. In January, the company's content offering will be rolled out in the Middle East and Africa. People across the world are hungry for health and wellness information that is accurate, up to date, and from a trusted source. Incorporating Ever-Evolving Technical Trends Being located in the heart of the tech community has given Andrea and her team the advantage of tapping tech talent and incorporating ever-evolving technical trends. The underlying architecture of ConnectWell's content offering makes it visually oriented and easy to navigate, while providing seamless integration into the portals of their customers.
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interactive digital tools company and platform. With 50% of people in the U.S. having high blood pressure, and 88% of people with prediabetes not knowing they have the condition, it is key to engage people with virtual health tools and pull them into the care funnel.
“
“We educate, engage, and support people to integrate wellness into life through expertly vetted, up-to-date digital health and wellness content that is science based.”
These tools can be placed on the “digital front door” of ConnectWell's customers to re-engage the people they serve in their health. The first launch includes 11 underlying health conditions that make people vulnerable if they get COVID-19. Plans are underway to build on this to activate people virtually in their care across dozens of health conditions. These virtual tools provide the vehicle to make people aware of their health risks and then to seek care. Learn more about ConnectWell here: https://www.connectwell.health https://www.healthandwellness.tools
Andrea Bloom Founder & CEO ConnectWell
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DR JOANNE M. HACKETT Enabling a Better Quality of Life for Everyone
J
oanne M. Hackett, the CCO of Genomics England, is an accomplished entrepreneur, scientist and strategist with experience in the execution and management of complex business transactions. She has extensive management experience in health and pharma industry which enables her to ensure the commercial success of the organization. Joanne possesses multidisciplinary knowledge and she is highly skilled in team management, setting external investment strategies and the identification and evaluation of targets. Joanne has spent many years in business management which is reflecting on her strengths and weaknesses and she is trying to surround herself with people who complements her. She believes “True leadership is about empowering those around you to be successful.” Joanne also believes that she has been very fortunate to have people around her who are excellent leaders and whom she could learn from. She has also witnessed behaviors that she did not want to emulate. Joanne has always tried to lead by example and listen twice as much as she speaks. Genomics England has a very unique offering: the team at the company work very closely with the National Healthcare Service in order to provide clinical and genomic data for individuals with suspected rare diseases and cancer. This linked clinical and genomic data is crucial for advancing research and development, which in turn will positively impact healthcare. It is incredibly important for
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Genomics England
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I was once told that if my dreams did not scare me they were not big enough research (be it academic or industrial) to be carried out on this data. As such, the team has designed a secure Research Environment that grants access to the qualified researchers. The hope is that the undiagnosed participants will one day get a proper diagnosis – which will be the result of the data being accessed. The linked clinical and genomic data is very useful for repurposing drugs, stratifying for clinical trials and for real world data and evidence to be generated. It is necessary to know the audience, what the market has to offer and what changes are required to advance the industry. It is also incredibly useful to be aligned with major strategic initiatives. Don’t try to ‘own’ everything – it is much better to contribute to a larger ambition and move things forward faster. For Joanne “leadership is about defining a goal and getting those around you to support and strive to achieve it.” The leaders who see themselves as a part of something greater are the ones who are more confident and can take others with them. Leaders need to listen, be objective, be fair and empower those around them. Leaders also need to be reflective and seek feedback. No one has all the answers, and there is never just one opinion. It is very rare that leaders actually have the authority to make decisions in isolation. Consultation is the key. This goes back to knowing the audience – it is much better to have many leaders pushing forward the same
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agenda and inuencing a wider network collaboratively. Joanne has a genetic disease and she has always wanted to advance healthcare to enable others to have a better quality of life. She believes that good health is the best thing anyone could hope for and with her approaches; she wants to touch as many lives as possible. Joanne spends a lot of time reading, attending conferences, events and showcases, and is implementing pilot projects to determine if it is feasible for full implementation. She also observes t h e w ay s e n i o r l e a d e r s c o n d u c t themselves and try to understand if any of the behaviours and strategies would be useful for her to adopt. she learns something new everyday. Joanne has relentlessly pushed forward health partnerships between the A, B, C’s: Academia, Business and the Clinical community. She was instrumental in reconďŹ guring stroke services, merging three cardiovascular hospitals to their streamline services; implement a Genomic Medicine Service into the healthcare system. She was designing and implementing a Research Environment that houses clinical and genomic data. Joanne has also been instrumental in getting the Clinical Entrepreneurs Programme launched as well as the NHS Innovation Accelerator and the DigitalHealth and London Acelerator successfully running. Joanne spends most of her time mentoring, advising and investing in healthcare SMEs. She wants to continue to revolutionize healthcare. The deep personal satisfaction she receives from changing the way healthcare is delivered is enough to keep her committed and dedicated, regardless how frustrating it can be. For now, she will continue to change the world one genome at a time.
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ARL Arlen Meyers MD,MBA President & CEO
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Society of Physician Entrepreneurs
LEN MEYERS,
MD, MBA
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hose who lead health service organizations need to evolve from technicians to managers to leaders to entrepreneurs to leaderpreneurs in order to thrive. Some call it practicing at the top of one’s license. In addition, filling the Csuite with more physician managers just makes it harder to innovate and adds further clutter to the organization. Leaderpreneurs lead innovators; they don’t just manage innovation systems. After 40 years as a professor of otolaryngology (ear, nose and throat surgery) at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, Dr. Arlen Meyers, President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs, transitioned from teaching, practicing and researching the art of medicine to teaching, practicing and researching the business of medicine, innovation and entrepreneurship.
Transforming Healthcare by Entrepreneurship
Arlen teaches innovation and entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado Denver Anschutz medical campus and the business school at the downtown campus. Also he is a physician in residence at the Jabs Center for Entrepreneurship. In addition, he also consults to several healthcare companies which are creating drugs, devices, diagnostics, digital health products, care delivery
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entrepreneurship personal but don’t “Make take it personally. Connect to what drives you
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but don’t take the inevitable failures personally. Instead, learn from them
models and medical education platforms. The mission of Society of Physician Entrepreneurs (SoPE) a non-profit, global open biomedical and clinical innovation and entrepreneurship network is helping members get their ideas to patients.
mentors, experience, peer to peer support and career and professional development training. The most important trait, however, is an entrepreneurial and growth mindset. Innovation starts with mindset. Nowadays, leaders are charged with winning the 4th industrial revolution that is powered by cyber intelligence. That involves creating, scaling and sustaining a culture of innovation and leading an ambidextrous resilient organization with a workforce that has an entrepreneurial mindset. Overcoming those barriers require an innovative structure, process and culture that is supportive and determines the success by measuring the results of outcomes, not process or engagement. In addition Arlen said “Be sure you clearly define entrepreneurship, innovation and value and paint a picture of success so followers know the goal.”
Arlen does not believe sick care, i.e. a system that predominantly takes care of sick patients instead of keeping them healthy, can be fixed from inside. That is the reason his non-profit, the SoPE (Society of Physician Entrepreneurs ) is a global open innovation network that includes many different stakeholders, not just doctors ,but also other health professionals such as investors, service providers, technologists, patients, academics and many more. Each member segment wants SoPE to do a different job for them and, therefore, the company emphasizes different value propositions to each segment. The overall mission, however, remains the same; helping members get their ideas to patients or help someone who is.
To get updated with technological trends, and to boost personal and company’s growth, Arlen practices entrepreneurial habits and has created an encore career portfolio. He reads articles and books outside of sick care, writes almost every day, and accepts assignments where he has limited experience. He believes that he is
According to Arlen, physician entrepreneurs and leaderpreneurs need education, resources, networks,
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learning from failure to fill his blind spots. He actively mentors, consults and advises start-ups developing new technologies. Teaching, speaking, connecting people and building robust internal and external networks, consulting with mentors and a personal advisory board and attending non-sick care technology events and conferences all are helping him to achieve consistency and growth.
resources to do it, so he decided to do something to change that. Arlen is attempting, with the help of others, to lead change with the goals of transforming sick care to health care, reforming medical education and training, restoring the joy of medicine, and improving the disparity in global health outcomes through the deployment of innovation. He is building an international innovation and entrepreneurship network and helping, educating students to win the 4th industrial revolution. He is aiming to reduce sick care quality cost, access and experience inequities, and reconcile the conflicts between the ethics of business with the ethics of medicine with these he is changing the rules for the common good and creating sustainability.
Midway in Arlen’s academic career, with his colleagues, he invented a device to optically detect oral cancer. The team attempted to transfer the technology to commercial markets but never made it over the finish line. It was the first of many of his entrepreneurial failures. The experience taught him three important lessons including; 1) everyone thinks they have a good idea 2) they don’t know what to do with their ideas, and 3) they won’t be taught what to do with their ideas in formal training.
Arlen is scaling the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs around the world in an effort to close global health outcome disparities through the deployment of biomedical and clinical innovation and entrepreneurship.
Arlen thinks it is cruel and unusual punishment to expect people to innovate and create value and pay them for value without giving them the education, training and
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Elena Kyria Finding Exceptional Talent 46
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To have problems is to be alive. The only people who don’t have problems live in a graveyard.
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lena is an award winning specialist on talent attraction.
She helps companies hire exceptional talent from all over the world. She coaches and supports top talent in building up their professional brand, to maximize career possibilities. She is also specialised in sourcing, supporting and recruiting experienced professionals in Quality and Regulatory Affairs for startups, SME’s and global corporations in the Medtech industry. Find out about her story below. After 5 years of working for a corporate recruitment company and achieving the title of top performer, Elena decided to go it alone and she started her own business at the age of 25. Elemed is specialized in recruiting exceptional talent in the medtech industry, and works across Europe with all types of companies, Startups, Consultancies, Notified Bodies and Industry. One of the great things about being a specialist recruiter is that the you are able to see the whole picture across the industry. When recruiting for corporates, some of the most common complaints from candidates is the complexity of the organisational structure, the time it takes to get decisions through, and not being able to have a real impact. Whilst companies can’t simply go in and flatten the organisational structure, her advice to leaders is to engage in discussions with their employees, to give them a chance to feel that their voice is being heard. She is proud to play an instrumental role to bring companies some of the best talent in the market. The company recruits the people that solve regulatory and compliance problems so that patients from all over the world can have access to life saving and life enhancing medical devices. It is in a really pivotal moment in the medical device industry with the transition to the new regulation. “This puts a big strain on resources for a lot of companies, and our role in helping companies recruit technically competent, effective candidates in an extremely passive market is something we are great at.”
One of the main things, she has learnt about leadership is that great leaders are developed and not born. Leadership is less about you and more about the people you are leading, their wants, their needs and their feelings. “It’s a really enjoyable yet challenging journey, but for me, one of the most rewarding things is seeing your team become more and more independent and excel.” She was once told, “a leadership success is getting your people to the point they no longer need you". As a business, it’s always important to be diversifying the offerings to make sure that the company is fitting well with what the clients need, but it’s also important to give back. Whilst recruitment is its core business, there is a huge demand for information on the new medical device regulation, especially in the medical device market where Elemed recruit. She recently had the idea to create a community among her Linkedin Network. The EU MDR/IVDR update forum was created as a place to share ideas, questions, updates and support. The idea has taken off really well- this online community currently stands at 3,500 people! Elena thinks and believes flexibility is important, as is a certain fearlessness to not be afraid to make mistakes. Leadership today is very much about empathy. Finally, the concept of the servant leader is something she aspires to be. This is the idea that you work for your team, they don’t work for you. Your job as leader is all about facilitating their success. Elena likes to read, alot! We are living in such a fascinating time. The internet has completely changed how we live our lives and how we interact as humans. She is really interested in personal growth and development, topics like the millennial generation in the workplace, how machine learning will impact us, and how the future of healthcare will look. As a company, it is a very exciting moment for Elena and her team, with the launch of their new website happening very soon. They have had a serious facelift. Stay tuned!
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Jahanara (Jan) Miotto A Valuable Asset in the Pharmaceutical Industry
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n today’s age of big data, companies operate on a global scale, and the volume of operational data is growing, not shrinking – resulting in increased management costs and the need to disseminate important information quickly & efficiently. Nowadays companies want to capture and integrate the data and information associated with those projects in a centralized database and then share that data and information with hundreds or thousands of people in real-time, whenever and wherever they happened to be. In this way, business leaders could leverage and reuse common business data far more efficiently than they could with any other traditional desktop tools. Continuing to build what she believed to be one of the best companies in this market today is one such leader Jahanara Miotto, President of Metrendalytics. The company’s advantage is having extensible hands-on experience and knowledge in R&D, leveraging that knowledge with current technologies to improve drug development outcomes.
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Converting Knowledge into marketable products or services is the key to successful innovation.
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Jahanara Miotto President Metrendalytics LLC
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integration, aggregation, and signal detection in interactive, visualizations, which allows for centralized, remote monitoring of project performance in real-time.
Genetic Risk-taker Leadership was one of those things that came naturally to Jahanara at a very young age. She supposes it had to. Jan was, the eldest child in a single-parent household, she had a lot of responsibilities at an early age. Her father was an immigrant who came to the US with only clothes in his backpack. So, the ability to take the risk, and seize an opportunity when presented was in Jahanara’s genetic makeup. She grew up in very humble surroundings and worked a variety of jobs while getting her degree, so she could become independent and contribute to her family.
A new area in Jahanara’s personal growth has been learning as much as she can about blockchain technology. According to Jahanara, this is the next disruptive technology that will eventually offer fundamental changes to the way companies do their business. Blockchain holds great potential as a unified solution for efficient and secure management of information around the globe. Its uniquely distributed network would enable the development of complete end-to-end information management for every company and product. By allowing multiple stakeholders to participate in distributing the network, it creates an incredibly secure database, without the patchwork configuration of previous technologies.
Jahanara began working in the pharmaceutical industry and was always looking to work hard and identify the areas she could bring the most value. Eventually, her hard work and dedication paid off as she was able to climb from entry-level to executive management.
Acquiring the knowledge Due to Jan’s personality, it was difficult to understand the importance of communicating what you do and highlight success. "Brag-advertising" was not part of how she was raised, and she often suffered with "let my work speak for me" mentality. However, we must remember that leaders work through the influence of others. And if others are unaware of what we do, then how will they consider us leaders? asks the leader. Jahanara eventually found a way to fulfill this, finding a delicate balance and way that works while still coming across as authentic.
‘Don’t be afraid to share your ideas...focus on things you have the power to change’, says Jahanara. She also adds ‘Always focus on good health. Good food, exercise, and sleep. Don’t keep to a fixed mindset and be able to explore new opportunities. If you wait for things to be perfect, you can miss opportunities. Don’t focus on the failures. Focus on the journey toward results. It’s better to do something and fail than to not try anything at all. Build good relationships. Spend time with people who are accomplished than you. Great leaders become great because they keep great company. And, this point is valid not just for leaders, but for almost anyone who is looking to grow in professional life. Building a network of influencers creates the ability to acquire the knowledge that no textbook can teach’.
Leadership is certainly a journey. ‘What makes some people leapfrog from just a good leader and becoming great is they take the time to understand what is needed and, then take actionable steps accordingly’, says Jan.
Business Strategy Goals Incredibly Secure Database Acquiring and disseminating information available during that time provides a significant competitive advantage for businesses. Metrendalytics is completely focused on providing the underlying technology for information distribution. Providing full visibility to portfolio status, predicting milestone delays, and proactively identifying milestones issues. Each study and associated risks signals will be summarized to product level as to key project threats impacting
Jahanara’s vision is to provide Portfolio Management tools providing the ability to eliminate silos, gain insight, and improve risk management by providing a consistent, timely view of risk indicators across all projects. She works with the unique needs of each company in proposing the development of an Operational Dashboard with automated data
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regulatory submission and overall business strategy goals.
front of it and lead it, says Jahanara. She also adds, Your customers count on you to do this for them. All one has to do is to look at how technologies such as the Internet and Amazon to see how they have fundamentally changed our lives.
Services to Customers Companies need platforms to create efficiencies comprehensively across project planning and execution with built-in analytic tools that are easy to implement, highly customizable, and cost- effective. Metrendalytics works with the unique needs of each company in proposing the development of an Operational Dashboard with automated data integration, aggregation, and signal detection in interactive visualizations, which allows for centralized, remote monitoring of project performance in real time. Reviewers would be able to zero in on signals and trends that could affect operational performance and make smarter decisions about how to deploy monitoring resources. This would eliminate the management of various inefficient spreadsheets that are typically being used for the tracking of these activities,.
‘We view technology as a building block. Technology itself is not just the end goal it is, a tool to facilitate the user experience… to achieve the desired outcome’. Advice for Growth Never stop adapting - For her company, experimentation has helped reach a product-market fit. Metrendalytics is constantly making tweaks to its products and testing new functionality to see what resonates best with its customers. Even though the company doesn’t always get it right, it keeps learning and adapting. Jahanara says ’Perseverance and intelligence are your allies; use them to your advantage. Change is good, the more volatile, the more disruptive it is. Expose yourself to as many new people ideas, challenges, and viewpoints as possible. The more you can learn, connect, and integrate, the more you can evolve and grow. There is no end sight for what we can accomplish’.
Jahanara focuses on being authentic and bringing value every day. She listened to her customers and brought them the goods and services they needed. Metrendalytics are constantly developing additional services and solutions that complement its core communications offering that, in turn, help the company’s customers maintain their relevance as well as helping them to increase their revenues and profitability.
Look at the world through the eyes of other people. People get caught up in their vision without carefully considering what might be the actual flaws in their plan. Best to take a step back and get a fresh perspective. Jahanara believes, Accountability is also key like responding to emails on time, doing what to say you’ll do and being genuinely honest and hard-working to not only the customers but all people, gives others faith in you more likely to recommend you as a trusted friend, rather than a business.
Technology not the End Goal The successful CEO and by extension their company has to not only adapt but also sense the market and get out in
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