Blog

For three days each Fall, the Santa Clara Convention Centers is transformed into a healthcare wonderland, complete with 1,000 of your closest friends in health tech. The on-stage sessions, curated and hosted by Indu Subaiya and Matthew Holt of Health 2.0 fame, are always a hit. Their finely tuned sense of how the past informs the future has been cultivated over decades of paying attention, and being in the audience at the Health 2.0 Annual Fall Conference is a crash course in healthcare transformation. 

One audience favorite is a session called Fireside Chats: Executive Views (the session formerly known as 3 CEOs). It’s a series of pithy, back-to-back personal interviews between a notable CEO and a prominent journalist. Lively, personal, and slightly unscripted, this year’s lineup featured: Glen Tullman (of Livongo, that IPO’d last month), Jonathan Bush (after a controversial departure from athenahealth last year) and Josh Stevens (of DayTwo, who recently raised a solid sum of $50 million.) Here are the highlights…. 

Time travels fast, but innovation is faster. Cultural adoption lags in comparison to the pace of innovation. Every day industry media breaks the news of a technology that can alter an image using your mind. Or entire forests that grow on the sides of buildings. Or Elon Musk sending people to vacay on the moon. What seems outlandish one day becomes normal, seemingly in the blink of an eye.

In all the ways in which digital health elevates care delivery and the patient experience there is one area that seems to universally unite the cause: Oncology. Cancer affects 100% of Western populations, either directly or through a friend or family member. The near-ubiquitous nature of the disease has led to $4.6 billion in funding from the American Cancer Association alone. Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed followed by Lung and Colon. The chances of getting cancer hovers around 39% for men and 37% for women, and yet, the disease remains a mystery. While curing cancer is the dream, many of us would settle for learning how to manage cancer the way one might manage a chronic disease, like diabetes. We are getting closer - but the journey is not without obstacles. 

Each year, in the forests of Jyväskylä, Finland, startups, innovators and entrepreneurs take the nerve racking, high-stakes “pitch” to the next level

And with technology, the pace is exponential. Case in point, we recently published a piece on The Cohabitation of Digital Therapeutics and Pharma in the House of Digital Health. In the short time since, the Digital Therapeutic (DTx) space has continued to grow with new companies forming, existing companies expanding into new indications, or solutions advancing in their development stage. It seemed like an enigmatic discipline.

Developing nations are, for the first time, being impacted by the kinds of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) historically associated with wealthy countries, which now require interventions in similar measure. Diseases like cancer, diabetes, lung and cardiovascular disease are on the rise - 72% of all global deaths in 2016 were attributed to NCDs - and are caused by lifestyle and environmental factors such as poor diet, smoking, and toxic air quality.

Bayer’s G4A Ventures creates new businesses in Digital Health, unlocking new revenue streams and boosting existing ones by improving the lives of patients and consumers. Our foundation is understanding desires and behaviors in the context of situations. We focus on this through every step, from the challenge question through minimum viable product testing and into commercialization. G4A Ventures normally takes a solution to market.

Our five senses are how we understand the world around us. The ability to see, taste, touch, smell, and hear provide information that streams into our consciousness 100% of the time. The smell of trees after the rain, the sound of a live jazz riff on upright bass, the sight of your grandchild taking their first steps … these are the joys of life. Unfortunately for people experiencing Macular Degeneration, the slow dissolve of central sight is marked by blurry vision, and is particularly common with old age.

Check out the May 17 Webinar - pics, recording and click here for transcript!