The People behind Healthcare Innovation: Interview with Claudio Hasler, Co-Founder and CEO of PeakProfiling

As part of my work, I have the privilege to speak with many inspiring innovators. However, the business community usually focuses more on companies, pitches and valuations, and less on the innovator. I think it would be interesting to learn a bit more about the people behind healthcare innovation. Therefore, I'm going to share some of my conversations with innovators in condensed form: 6 questions, 6 answers about their experience, their opinions and learnings.

The first conversation is with Claudio Hasler, Co-Founder and CEO of PeakProfiling, a company that uses voice analysis to detect diseases.

Tobias: What’s your story, how did you become an innovator in healthcare?

Claudio: It was while working for Google several years ago that I realized digital technologies would shake up the healthcare industry as we know it – I was absolutely thrilled by this. Thus, I moved to an over-the-counter (OTC) player (Europe’s number four in cough & cold OTC treatments) to lead all digital activities and, in rapid succession, also business intelligence and analytics.

I asked myself: “Why wouldn’t it be possible to detect different types of cough via a phone call, using algorithms?” That’s how I got to know Dr. Langner, an expert in sound analytics with more than 20 years of research experience. When I asked him if his technology could solve this challenge, he said: “Compared to what we are currently detecting from the voice, this sounds easy.” I immediately knew I had come across something groundbreaking. Some time later, I quit my executive position to team up with Dr. Langner and founded PeakProfiling.

Tobias: Where do you see the field of voice analysis moving to in the next ten years?

Claudio: I believe that voice analysis will become an integral part of medical diagnostics – just like blood or genetic tests today. Why? Because the advantages of this digital biomarker are so big: accuracy is high, it works via mobile phone technology, and perspectively for a wide range of diseases – e.g., depression, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, lung diseases, heart conditions, etc.

Moreover, all stakeholders benefit: doctors receive objective data for aid with diagnoses, pharmaceutical manufacturers can better select for patients involved with the R&D of new therapies, insurers may save on costs, and patients may receive treatment earlier in the disease course alongside individualized measurements of success.

Take depression as an example: imagine we detect depression early via telephone before it becomes fully manifest – the value will be substantial for all.

Tobias: Looking more broadly, what are the biggest opportunities and obstacles you see for innovation in the healthcare environment?

Claudio: I think there is a consensus that the medicine of the future will be preventive, personalized, predictive, and participatory. All of those elements are closely related to diagnostics. At the same time, digitalization will be the driving force of the industry. Combine these and it becomes clear that the opportunities in digital diagnostics will be great.

At the same time, healthcare leaders should have a clear understanding of what is ‘buzz’ and what is currently possible. For example, look at the millions of press articles about artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare: how can it be possible that the FDA only cleared the very first standalone AI-powered medical device in April this year? There are clear challenges: most individual clinical trials are just too small for AI. Moreover, AI algorithms are typically black boxes and thus very hard to get certified within the current regulatory framework. These obstacles will not be resolved anytime soon. In fact, I believe at this point the biggest asset of our company in healthcare is that we can build stable algorithms with small clinical data sets - as a precondition for regulatory approval. I don’t want to get too technical, but the reason for this is that we focus more on features than on classification.

Tobias: When you look at the health system as a whole (providers, payers, regulators, doctors, patients) where did you see most / least openness for innovation?

Claudio: Most openness? Definitely the patients! Let me give you an example: we recently won the major innovation award of Germany’s largest health insurer, TK, and they wrote an article about our research in their members’ journal. Within days, our inbox was full of emails from people asking if they could send us voice data to receive an ADHD diagnosis. The interest was overwhelming.

Least openness: I would say that while the main actors in healthcare are principally open to innovation, it is more a question of speed. They perceive a project duration of several years as normal while technology ventures think in weeks. Yes, of course healthcare is highly regulated, yet being slow is something you just cannot afford with data-based business models. Why? Because it is a race: whoever is first in the market with a certified device is also the first to produce real-world data to feed back into the algorithms – which makes it extremely hard for anyone else to catch up. Therefore, the best strategy for the big biopharmaceutical players would be to get involved at a much earlier stage compared to their traditional business and take fast, limited risks to see if a concept brings value.

Just as an example, our company is also analyzing sound in an industrial context: we predict when machines will break from the sound they produce. You would not believe just how much faster the big, traditional industrial players we work with are compared to those in healthcare.

 Tobias: What’s the single most important thing that policymakers could do to enable digital transformation of health systems?

Claudio: In my point of view, policy makers need to see that digital transformation of the health system is already happening: the value for patients is just so big that no regulatory system will ever stop it in the long run. I would even say large parts of future progress in medicine will be based on data science. The question is rather who will benefit from it.

Today, medical data is closed and fragmented. Companies with the resources to build, buy, and analyze medical data are thus in the best position to be the winners of the digital transformation in healthcare – which is arguably the big American technological companies today. So, I think that especially for Europe, there is a real danger of losing the race in the huge health economy as they did in the internet economy a couple of years ago.

I believe Europe should provide better access to healthcare data in a safe way and set the topic as an investment priority. This may be challenging with all the stakeholders involved, but haven't we just learnt from the new EU privacy regulations that even the most complex, heterogeneous regulatory topics can be streamlined if the priority is high enough?

Tobias: What do you know now that you wish you had known when you were starting out as an innovator and entrepreneur?

Claudio: I have always been very much involved in the topic of digital transformation. But now, with my own company, the level of exposure to the leaders of the development is fantastic. With everything I see today, I would probably have pushed the topic even harder and faster in my previous roles. If you look at the big organizations I am currently interacting with - especially from the healthcare and industrial sector - it seems to me they could act much bolder:

Oftentimes, when talking about 'digitalization', different departments of big organizations talk about completely different things. For example, Operations may in fact talk about 'process automation', Marketing about better 'customer targeting', Sales about 'eCommerce', IT about 'data' and 'CRM' - and so on. These views are all valuable, but the thinking is often incremental. Yet, digital technologies enable much more radical innovation and completely new business models. 

Let me give you a random example from our domain: if you are doing a clinical trial in Alzheimer's (a field where we have not yet been active) - why not asking patients if they could provide you with a video of their wedding from 30 years ago, or any other old voice recording? It would literally take us only a few months to find out if an early detection of Alzheimer's from the voice is possible - which would be groundbreaking and might help to finally find preventive measures against this terrible disease. Is that a conventional study design? Of course not. How would the FDA react? I don't know. This is an example of what I meant by taking fast, limited risks to create something completely new with digital technologies. Overall, I see so many exciting opportunities in the field – I am happy to be part of it!  

For more information, see Claudio Hasler.