The People behind Healthcare Innovation: Interview with Guy Meger, CTO and GM at EarlySense

As part of our work, we have the privilege to speak with many inspiring innovators. Although the business community usually focuses on companies, pitches, and valuations—and less on the innovator—we thought it would be interesting to learn a bit more about the people behind healthcare innovation. In this series, we’re sharing some of our conversations with innovators in a condensed format: six questions and six answers about their experience, their opinions, and their learnings.

The latest conversation is with Guy Meger, CTO, General Manager, and VP of Research & Development at EarlySense, a provider of contact-free, continuous-monitoring solutions for healthcare.

Gila: What’s your story? How did you become an innovator in healthcare?

Guy: As long as I can remember I have been attracted to technology and using it to solve problems creatively. I was even known as “MacGyver” (after the 1980s TV series) when I was a teenager. So, I chose to be an engineer. I started my career in 2002 when I graduated from the Technion as a computer engineer right after the dot.com bubble burst. I was able to see first-hand how the market goes from boom to bust. This helped me better understand that, whatever I do in this market, it must be meaningful for me and aligned with my values and beliefs. I decided to go for life-saving solutions.

In 2007 I Joined Earlysense just after early proof of concept of a proprietary lifesaving contact-free sensing technology. The mission was to build an R&D organization for this exciting, but still raw, concept of continuous monitoring and early prediction of clinical events with our unique sensor under mattress to create a new market. The unique combination of a sensor that created a fountain of clinical data feeding layers of signal-processing algorithms, AI, and machine-learning technologies excited me. We had a group of creative engineers, from variety of disciplines, who had to join forces and work closely together, implementing skills and know-how that were acquired in other fields of expertise to create this innovation. Of course, the challenges we faced were greater than I imagined—ranging from the design of a totally new medical device using disruptive technology, while simultaneously solving compliance issues, making it easy to use, developing predictive algorithms, and cutting-edge signal processing using fledgling data science and AI technology.

However, this was also a personal quest for me. When my grandmother was only 63 years old, she died suddenly in hospital—an event that could have never happened if EarlySense technology was being used as a standard of care. Today I know I’ve achieved the first part of my quest. The largest hospital-bed manufacturer in the US has signed an agreement with EarlySense to use our technology to change the standard of care and to make every hospital bed a “smart bed”. HillRom has just decided to acquire the rights to use our technology for the acute market. My quest is now focused on my next goal, which is to use our sensor technology to enhance the efficacy of remote patient monitoring and to make the beds of every high-risk chronic and elderly patient a "smart bed".

Gila: Where do you see the field of remote monitoring moving to in the next ten years?

Guy: Remote patient monitoring had already changed dramatically even before COVID-19 as it moved beyond pilots to being a standard of care… and finally achieving reimbursement in the USA. With the pandemic, remote monitoring has truly experienced a sea change, with everyone in the medical space (whether a patient, provider, or payer) understanding that most hospitalized patients would be safer, and at least as well cared for, if they were monitored at home. Additionally, everyone could now see that digital technologies allowed us to function normally without leaving our homes. While technology had evolved greatly throughout the years, it was the external event of the pandemic that drove the final adoption. Here are a few data points:

• Pre-pandemic private insurance claims for telehealth in the US were fewer than 0.2 percent; by April 2020 almost 8 percent.
• Medicare/Medicaid telehealth insurance claims grew even faster at 11,000 percent.
• CMS has approved 80 new services and lifted restrictions on telehealth in the wake of COVID-19.
• Moving forward, $250 billion, or 20 percent of all Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial outpatient, office, and home health spend could be done virtually.

All of this is a major driver for growth over the next few years and will change the face of medicine as we once knew it. Of course, this disruptive change won’t last forever, as what usually happens after the hype is a process of “natural selection” as the market matures. The players that are the strongest, most suited to the market, and can scale will survive, grow, and evolve. Opportunistic players or poor solutions will disappear. Next steps for RPM are threefold: first, to make it completely plug and play with no patient intervention needed and to automate compliance; second to use AI to be able to compare a patient’s biometric signals and their broader medical information against both their baseline and also against a broader population—the goal being to look for key insights which may indicate deterioration or a possible future change in their condition; and third, to use these key insights and AI to help propose potential key actions and interventions.

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

 Guy: The biggest opportunity is to take advantage of the ubiquity of digital technologies and the easy availability of biometric and other health-related information to rapidly improve the standard of care: that is, providing truly long-lasting solutions that will show positive outcomes not only during COVID-19 times but also post-pandemic. Many of the actions taken during the pandemic, such as the accelerated use of AI to improve the speed and accuracy of clinical decision making will continue to create value after the pandemic is over. The pandemic has moved the market to more readily look for and adopt new solutions, on things that may have been out of the question only a year earlier.

As for obstacles, the pandemic forced many changes and questioning of many norms. The fact that patients in post-acute and long-term care saw their mortality rates rise dramatically has forced a major rethink of the care continuum, while the drop-off in patient census in these segments has had a major financial impact and forced a reckoning. COVID-19 has highlighted the fact that contamination risk at these facilities is much higher than home hospitalization (though it was known well before the pandemic). Longer term, the pandemic will affect every aspect of the current care continuum: everything from technology procurement to a complete rethink of who should be admitted to acute care. There will be major winners and losers in the industry as a result of this shift. 

Gila: When you look at the health system as a whole (pharma, providers, payers, doctors, patients) who do you see driving innovation the most?

Guy: The key drivers for innovation are threefold and are intimately linked. First, patients represent the major catalyst for innovation as they are both increasingly demanding and accepting of change. In addition, all age groups have grown to accept and expect technology to improve the quality of their lives. These expectations are behind the movement of the healthcare center of gravity from the hospital and physician office to the home, or wherever the patient is. 

Second, it is the technology companies that accelerate change as they are continuously looking for and creating the means to improve the availability of healthcare and reduce cost and complexity.

Third, and equally important, are the principal holders of financial risk for patients. In the US there is a trend for greater integration between payers and providers. This places even greater emphasis, across both payers and providers (as they take on more risk), on using technology to generate and analyze higher-quality patient data—for example, by looking at very specific patient populations to find ways to optimally manage them; to harness technology to move clinical decisions closer to the patient; and to make this process faster and more proactive.  

Gila: How has COVID-19 affected receptiveness to innovation in healthcare?

Guy: Although COVID-19 took the world by surprise, many of the technologies employed during the pandemic were fortunately developed during the prior decade. This is especially true with digital. The nature of the pandemic made it necessary to maintain distance and use remote and virtual technologies. As a result, people could continue to work, but from home. With COVID-19, the overwhelming pressure on the health system pushed everyone to adopt these remote technologies and open the door to innovative clinical solutions. Regulators had to find ways to flex their requirements and to allow technology to help in the face of this challenge. As a result, telehealth and RPM moved almost overnight from a technology used only by early-adopters to a standard of care. With this, came the rise of predictive analytics, as decision-support scores and the use of AI were found to be critical when the number of patients was so high and the risk of deterioration so real. As in every crisis, talented people began to look at harnessing technology and even achieved FDA emergency-use authorization. 

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

 Guy: When I started out as an innovator, I was confident that the technology challenge would be the largest challenge I would face. Since then, after overcoming countless technical challenges, I know for sure that—never mind how great your technology is (though it must work flawlessly of course)—the single most crucial parameter is timing. Finding ways to bridge market maturity is a crucial success factor.  

For more information, see Guy Meger and EarlySense.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and his guest contributor and do not reflect the views of McKinsey & Company.