It’s complicated - Why digital health is still looking for "The One"
Noah Therapies GmbH
We are the Platform for New Women's Health that empowers women to take control of their health during any life phase.
The interest in digital health is at an all time high, but so far the number of true success stories is sobering.?
The fact that we clearly have not yet succeeded in truly making medicine digital forces us to ask ourselves: Where do we keep failing??
According to a venture capital report from Stout , Syte and DHV, the average Net Promoter Score in Healthcare is 28 points, lower than in any other industry.?
We have spent billions on building complex AI. We have developed wearable tracking technology in all shapes and forms. We have patient monitoring tools able to follow a patient's every move. We have every technological possibility we can dream of at our fingertips and yet the effect on the healthcare system still feels neglectable. Why??
Precision Medicine is changing medicine
Modern medicine is evolving constantly. Since a couple of years we see a clear trend emerging. It is the result of evolving diagnostic precision and individualization in medicine.?
Precision Medicine is on the rise and it is here to stay.
Many definitions emphasize that precision medicine is less a “one-drug-fits all” approach rather than an individualized therapy concept based on genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors.?
Today, to fight a disease like cancer we analyze the genetic profile of a tumor cell to look for hundreds of aberrations in molecules and genes and find the right target to treat medicinally.
The result is patient journeys that are increasingly individualized, fragmented and complex (in breast cancer alone there are over 80 different drugs and administration types to choose from based on personal patient and disease characteristics. Treatment cycles last month and years).?
Anyone who has ever gone through a treatment involving several doctors and hospital visits will confirm this experience: The processes feel like pure chaos.?
Don’t we all in secret - after going through another odyssey - think to ourselves “What is so hard about scheduling an appointment or sending a medical record electronically?”
The truth is that booking an appointment or sending a medical record (and sadly, also listening to patients) is at the very end of a doctor’s job. That’s why this part of the job is done in an unsatisfying way. Jotted down on a piece of paper or into a fax machine instead of neatly organized in a digital calendar tool (or clearly explained to the patient).?
What they really need to figure out daily is which tests to run, which appointments to book and which medication to prescribe. Here is where they focus all their attention, to not get anything wrong. Precision Medicine has made this task incredibly complex for them.
What is Medicine today??
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All the other problems we face in healthcare are related to Management Complexity
Medicine is the opposite of “one size fits all”. Yet, this is what we see in the digital health market.
Let’s take a look at a few segments on the digital health map in Europe (Thanks Speedinvest ).?
Enabling tech for providers has seen the biggest success stories ( Doctolib , Kry and the whole telemedicine market) so far, but many others are struggling with adoption.
The market is fragmented and doctors are reluctant to add another tool to the mix. Even though the time-saving potential would be huge, software often remains neutral with little knowledge of the context in which decisions are made by professionals.
The result of this “one-size-fits all” approach is that we miss the opportunity to support doctors by providing tech with medical intelligence and therefore design a truly time-saving user journey for them.?
The alternative is to tackle the problem from the other side and build patient facing solutions.
Here the market is focusing (also pushed by regulatory frameworks) either on consumer health or digital therapeutics. While Consumer Health is often put into the category of “wellness and lifestyle”, digital therapeutics by definition follow a therapeutic goal. To enter the reimbursement system they need to prove a therapy outcome, similar to a drug that needs to get approval before it can enter the market.?
This is exactly what makes the market for Digital Therapeutics so tough: Today we practice Precision Medicine. What works for one patient doesn’t work for someone else, no matter if we talk about drugs or lifestyle changes (Interesting Ted Talk about diet here).?
If your intended use is a therapeutic one, you need to prove an outcome for a specific patient population. But once you build your business model you need to capture a big enough market size. Ultimately, you will struggle with finding an impactful topic that is monetisable at the same time.
Most solutions are forced into some kind of “one size fits all” approach (symptom tracking, mental health) or a very specific market which makes monetization challenging and creates silos for the user.
Naturally, clinical adoption and user engagement becomes the biggest challenge.
Digital solutions need to become the manager, not the therapist.?
Maybe we need to take a step back and look for the answer in a more humble approach. By first of all building tech that supports patients and doctors in managing diseases based on the current (already very advanced!) standard of care.
An article on the topic of Patient Journey Automation and how it works will follow soon!