Tech Week 2021: Resilient with Health Tech
When: Wednesday, December 8, 2021
Companies Represented: Picnic Health, Natera, Red Ventures & Healthline, and Florence Healthcare
Panel Speakers: Deepak Bhandarkar, Nancy Carl, Asaf Sadowsky, Riley Schott, Kathryn Meagley
Moderator: Danielle Miller – VP of Events, HLS Club
Company and Speaker Introductions
Picnic Health – Deepak Bhandarkar and Nancy Carl
The CEO and Co-founder Noga Leviner lives with a chronic condition – Chrons disease. Back in 2014, Leviner went to multiple providers and had multiple appointments, which resulted in a lot of difficulty keeping up with her medical records. She created PicnicHealth as a solution and tool to digitize and manage keeping and tracking medical records. Each usergets a Picnic Health timeline and a digitized copy of their medical records, creating a more efficient timeline for patients with chronic conditions. PicnicHealth uses patient information to create different cohorts, where PicnicHealth extracts PII data to license specific medical data and sends it to partners with the objective of optimizing care for specific cohorts.
PicnicHealth has stayed resilient in Health Tech by initially launching the product with a patient-centric approach and as a B2C business, focused on providing data to patients to help with their own care. Use data they have and go to their medical providers and doctors with a digitized version of their own patient journey. The company was not able to impact customers at a large enough scale and it proved too costly to do at a subscale. PicnicHealth transitioned to a B2B business model to impact patients on a large enough scale, all while continuing to focus on research with Pharma partners and maintain a patient-centric approach. . More patients and larger cohorts enable PicnicHealth to tackle other markets within the healthcare ecosystem where this medical data is useful.
Natera – Asaf Sadowsky
Natera is a clinical leader in genetic testing, specializing in cell-free DNA technology focusing on women’s health, cancer, and organ health. Cell-free DNA is extracted from the body to screen and detect specific conditions in patients.
To remain resiliency in Health Tech, Natera launched Panorama, a non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT), a leading-edge technology that can screen test pregnant women for conditions that impact a woman’s health and baby’s health. Asaf Sadowsky is the director of product and the driving force behind Natera. Sadowsky and his team focused on the patient and providers, making a product that is seamless, convenient and accessible via remote meetings, increased support and various financial options. He and his team identified verticals that support patients and providers, making a product seamless from inception to patient acquisition, giving patients access to the care they need from the start.
Red Ventures | Healthline – Riley Schott
Red Ventures is the parent company of Healthline, a commerce business. Healthline is the largest health digital publication in the world, sub-central with smaller domains, what Healthline does is connect massive audiences around a number of verticals with a number of health topics and conditions. Traditionally, this means on the Healthline side is through the top-funnel advertising pharma advertising cost per impression advertising. Red Ventures is a performance marketing business which pairs audiences with relevant partners and offers. Healthline does medical vetting in order to provide customers with a trusted selection. Healthline is built on medically-backed research and articles that help users transact and understand what’s happening with their own health and take an action that will help their health outcome over time.
In the spirit of resilience, they launched three months before the COVID pandemic and used the pandemic as an opportunity to adapt, grow, and launch based on opportunities in the market. The vision for the business changed during the pandemic, they initially thought their biggest business was going to be fitness, and that changed during the pandemic, fitness transitioned to an at-home experience.
Florence Healthcare – Kathryn Meagley
Meagley is helping Florence focus on how they can build resiliency within healthcare. She’s supporting their new product, eConsent, by getting participants into clinical trials by enabling the electronic consent workflow for sites and participants through an informed consent process. Florence’s entire mission is to give research sites their day back from paperwork and enable the remote workflows. Florence is a B2B health tech company founded in 2014.
The pandemic drastically shifted how companies and research conduct clinical trials and were forced to use technology to revitalize suspended trials and get work done remotely. Research is regulated space by the FDA and by ethical boards. Technology supports regulation and build resilience in clinical trials by:
- Helping people continue to work
- Enhanced collaboration and communication have allowed people to go into platforms remotely to monitor clinical trials, monitoring safety in a remote way
- Supporting existing workloads and workflows
- Through system integration and software products for data capture and communicating with the ethical board. Having an integrated solution that thinks about all these ways to solve problems.
- Innovation and Problem Solving
- Understanding the pain point and inflection point will enable innovation, advance processes, and solve problems. To do this, you need to understand the customer, the data, and the handoffs to where information can get lost. Applying technology can move processes forward and innovate healthcare challenges.