The People behind Healthcare Innovation: Interview with Kai Eberhardt, CEO and Co-founder of Oviva

As part of my work, I have the privilege of speaking with many inspiring innovators. Although the business community usually focuses on companies, pitches, and valuations — and less on the innovator — I thought it would be interesting to learn a bit more about the people behind healthcare innovation. In this series, I'm sharing some of my conversations with innovators in a condensed format, focusing on their experience, their opinions, and their learnings.

This latest conversation is with Kai Eberhardt, CEO and Co-founder of Oviva, a digital health company focusing on treating diet-related chronic diseases.

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

Kai: When I was 20, I had a run-in with cancer, which luckily could be well-treated; but since then, I’ve found much more purpose in supporting healthier, happier, and longer living. I filed my first patent?during my undergrad time on improving medical-imaging technology. After a PhD in that field, I was with McKinsey, working mainly with medical product manufacturers. When I was there, I got to know one of the founders of Welldoc—in my view, one of the founding companies of digital health. He had a new idea: this was to reach the patients in his clinic for ongoing, chronic care (and who didn’t need any physical exams or bloods) via their phones, which he saw them spending more and more time on. This was in 2013 and that is how Oviva was founded.

Tobias: Where do you see the field of chronic-disease management moving to in the next ten years?

Kai: Much more remote and digitally enhanced. Connected devices for monitoring chronic conditions have proliferated over the last few years, and now the connections between these tools— and the patients that use them —and providers are becoming part of the healthcare infrastructure. This will enable interventions and appointments to be based on changing patient needs, rather than in block intervals, driving clinical effectiveness.?During the COVID-19 lockdowns, both providers and patients experienced how digital tools can be truly valuable for care in large parts of the population, and not just a niche of digital innovators. For example, Oviva was not only able to continue providing essential care for people living with chronic conditions during COVID-19, it saw an increase in referrals and engagement during this time, when other face-to-face services had to stop seeing patients or move to telephone-only services.

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

Kai: The opportunity is the vast area of healthcare that has yet to benefit from the advantages technology has been proven to bring in many other sectors. One specific opportunity I am excited about is to improve care where the outcomes have rarely been measured rigorously. Technology can easily help us learn so much more about what works for each patient at each moment.?An example of this is behavior change. Being able to monitor engagement and usage of services, pinpointing where people start to dis-engage, means you can send specific nudges, content, or coach contact at the exact moment someone needs it, rather than having rolling appointments on a quarterly basis.

The obstacles are the established, often well-proven processes, and the complexity already in the system. The standards for patient safety and data security are high, and providers are busy caring for patients, meaning there is often limited time for innovation to take place. I feel that needs to be acknowledged more and addressed—for example, with ring-fenced time and resources for innovation. For example, every time I personally change systems from Android to iOS (affecting my word processor, calendar system, and so on) it takes real time to transition and typically involves some frustrating moments. It’s no different for healthcare professionals.

We also have the challenge of the evidence base: many national and international guidelines mainly incorporate evidence from randomised controlled trials (RCTs). While this remains the gold standard for areas such as pharmaceuticals, it can be challenging to apply the same evidence expectations in rapidly evolving areas such as digital health. For example, RCTs can take two to three years to complete and publish, by which point the digital health technology probably would have advanced significantly. In my opinion, we need to find approaches to incorporating real-world data within international guidance to ensure digital health can be more robustly and consistently included in healthcare recommendations.

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

Kai: There were always enthusiastic patients, payers, and providers—and by now in ever-increasing numbers. We do need the health system to create the right environment for digital to become fully accepted and mainstream. From my perspective, the UK has been on the cutting edge in Europe, promoting digital where the prospective advantages for patients and the system were deemed significant. They held innovators to high safety and quality standards in pilots and scaled it out with success, creating an environment where innovators could be successful. Germany took a big step forward with DiGA (digital therapeutics), a courageous move that I believe will be a first-mover advantage for the German health system and innovation.

Tobias: In your opinion, what is the single most important change that will better enable digital transformation in health systems??????

Kai: The biggest change we have seen in the last 2 years is the culture change that has occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this short time, we have seen a decade’s worth of cultural shift around acceptance of digital healthcare from patients, practitioners, and payers. In my view, the next step would be more direct reimbursement of digital health platforms by payers. Of course, they should require strong evidence for that.

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

Kai: Change can seemingly happen slowly, but it compounds over time. This is true for growth of your company in each market, the reimbursement landscape in front of you, and the acceptance of the populations and healthcare systems you serve. I enjoy rapid pace and, at times, can feel frustrated at things moving too slowly. The compounding makes this more tolerable, but requires persistent focus,?which is hard.

For more information, see Kai Eberhardt ?and Oviva .

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.