Health 2.0 Europe: “Improving and Enriching the Patient-Provider Relationship”

Last week, I had the opportunity to demonstrate Wellpepper and participate on a panel on “Improving and Enriching the Patient-Provider Relationship” at the Health 2.0 Europe Conference in London.  I’m grateful to the Washington Trade Association who funded a trade delegation to the conference and helped facilitate other meetings in London as well.

Last week, I had the opportunity to demonstrate Wellpepper and participate on a panel on “Improving and Enriching the Patient-Provider Relationship” at the Health 2.0 Europe Conference in London.  I’m grateful to the Washington Trade Association who funded a trade delegation to the conference and helped facilitate other meetings in London as well.

Health 2.0 Europe Panel

The panel format was that the moderator, in this case Health 2.0 CEO Indu Subaiya, and invited guests framed the conversation, and then invited companies to demonstrate their products related to the topic. After the demo, the panelists asked questions and discussed the implications and relevance of the product to the topic. The “Provider” view was represented by Dr. Simon Brownlee, a primary care physician and Chief Medical Officer of Healthloop UK. The “Patient” view was represented by Susan Jones, a person living with ME, also known as “chronic fatigue syndrome.” I spoke with Susan a bit backstage and learned that she was frustrated by the lack of knowledge about her condition, she took it upon herself to look for specialists and treatments outside of the UK – the epitome of an engaged patient.

Other startups on the panel:

Mark Friess from WelVU focused on patient education and engagement.

Nishant Bagadia from Nuehealth focused on helping patients find and connect to surgeons.

Tim Williams from myClinicalOutcomes focused on helping patients track and get information about long term conditions.

Interestingly, while we all focused on the patient-provider relationship, each took a different approach and the technologies ended up being complementary rather than competitive.

We discussed how patients are often confused by treatment plans and how care outside the clinic was becoming increasingly necessary as patient volumes increased. A recent study by Deloitte showed that elderly patients will increase the demand for in-person consultations by 33%. Given the expected shortage of healthcare providers, this isn’t going to be possible so we need new ways to engage. We also discussed the need to align outcomes between patients and providers. Oftentimes the patient has a very different view of a successful outcome as the provider, as outlined in this Harvard Business Review Infographic.

The conference was inspiring as healthcare providers, industry professionals, and startups acknowledged that we need to start doing things differently if we want to see better health outcomes. While there were similarities between the solutions presented across all the panels, there was actually very little duplication, which points to the vast challenges in healthcare today. Solutions came from all over the US, UK, and Europe, and were tackling both local and international markets. The best solutions were on par with what you see coming out of Silicon Valley; in particular we liked UMotif for its extremely usable approach to patient tracking and engagement, and the as-yet unreleased “You app” from Health Puzzle of Finland, which enables collaborative health challenges with friends.

My favorite session was the “Unmentionables,” where startups tackled problems that often weren’t discussed, like sexually transmitted diseases and alcohol abuse. My panel featured three US-based startups and one from the UK; this session was a representation of European innovation, and organizers were pleased to showcase so many more local talents than in previous years.