The people behind healthcare innovation: Interview with Oliver Harrison, CEO and Founder of Koa Health

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 sharing some of my conversations with innovators in a condensed format: six questions and six answers about their experience, their opinions, and their learnings.

This latest conversation is with Oliver Harrison, CEO and Founder of Koa Health, a company which seeks to bring mental health to everyone.

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

Oliver: As a young child, I loved to read science books and fell in love with the brain and the mind—the seat of our personalities, memories, dreams, and everything that makes us unique! I went on to study neuroscience and medicine at Cambridge and qualified as a doctor at UCL, with training in psychiatry at Imperial College and public health at Johns Hopkins.

Working in psychiatry in the UK, I saw every day the large gap between demand and supply. Waiting times were growing despite all our efforts to squeeze more patients into our busy working days. At the time, I lost two close friends to suicide; both were in traditional medical care. This galvanized me to dedicate my career to digital innovation. I committed to learn digital properly and spent five years in McKinsey’s Healthcare Practice.

In 2006, I got the opportunity to put theory into practice by building a new healthcare system in the Middle East. Moving my family to the UAE, I spent seven years as Director of Public Health in Abu Dhabi, where we put data into the heart of the new healthcare system. Combining human-led clinical treatment with data enabled screening and quality-generated improvements in outcomes across diabetes, heart disease, cancer, road accidents, and infectious disease. The published results are revolutionary.

Shortly after returning to Europe, I was approached to build a new healthcare company by Telefonica (a global telecoms business). Telefonica both encouraged our ambition to really change the game in mental health and provided us with the resources build our technology properly. The challenge we decided to address was the gap between supply and demand for mental healthcare.

At Koa Health, we do this by combining high-quality digital therapeutics and digital care navigation with human clinicians. Put simply, Koa tech boosts the ability of clinicians to care for more patients whilst delivering the best clinical outcomes (engagement and effectiveness). It has been a huge privilege to identify an important gap in healthcare and then be able to address it properly.

Tobias: Where do you see?behavioral health?moving to in the next ten years??

Oliver: We’ve known for 40 years that mental disorders are the world’s leading cause of disability. These are often long-term conditions, starting in late adolescence or early adulthood. We’ve seen steady increase in demand for care, and a generational gap, with Gen Z and millennials more likely to declare their mental health challenges and seek clinical treatment.

We have then experienced two seismic shifts caused by the global pandemic. Firstly, the uncertainty of a long-lasting global crisis, combined with concerns about our own safety and that of loved ones, and social isolation have caused a huge increase in the prevalence of common mental disorders with one in three people needing clinical care. Critically, this “democratization” of mental health symptoms has reduced stigma worldwide and brought a new level of openness and demand for scalable approaches to care. Secondly, we’ve seen a massive increase in the uptake of digital approaches to providing mental healthcare. Both trends have fundamentally changed the vector for innovation over the next ten years.

After 15 years working on digital innovation, I have never been more optimistic about the potential for progress. I predict that the next decade will see a rapid expansion of digital approaches to supporting mental health. As the market matures, I predict that the quality of digital tools will become more important, including their ability to drive engagement, their evidence of effectiveness, and their ethics regarding data management and access for diverse populations. The best technology will flourish, while weaker technology will leave the market.

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

Oliver: The clear opportunity is for digital technology to make a real contribution to boosting the supply of mental healthcare. When it is developed with both service users and expert clinicians, tested in rigorous clinical trials, and designed for ethics, digital technology can transform access to high-quality services. In our research, it’s wonderful to hear from patients whose lives have been transformed by using our products: “I haven’t left my apartment for two years and never thought my life would be transformed by using an app.”

There are two obstacles. Firstly, healthcare is a sector that is often slow to adopt new technologies, even when there is substantial evidence—it’s said that “healthcare moves forward one retirement at a time". Secondly, there continue to be a lot of poor-quality products on the market, which crowd out high-quality tech. Healthcare leaders should address the first obstacle, creating approaches to scaling the best tech, and regulators could address the second issue, limiting market access to the best technology and supporting incentives for the best technology to flourish.

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

Oliver: Often, it’s patients (service users) who are the most active advocates for innovation. Many of them are well aware of the challenges in traditional care models. One simple example is access: traditional care usually requires patients to set aside several hours to commute to the therapist for their session every week for months on end. People with jobs or complex childcare needs often find this difficult, notwithstanding the challenges of leaving their apartment for people with an anxiety disorder. Digital technology is available 24/7 at the convenience of the patient—and available when they’re actually experiencing symptoms. There is evidence that learning in the context of real life is more effective than reflective learning “on the therapist’s coach.”

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

Oliver: It’s critical that healthcare systems incentivize the best technology and weed out substandard technology. The best way to do this, while promoting innovation, is to monitor quality metrics routinely in practice. For example, in England, outcomes are measured for in-person and digital care for every patient episode in the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) service for talking therapies. This helps identify technology that delivers the best outcomes (and those that do not). Many other countries are looking at replicating this model.

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

Oliver: Innovation takes patience. Venture capital isn’t intrinsically patient, so it’s important to be as fast to market as possible and choose your investors carefully.

For more information, see Oliver Harrison and Koa Health.

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.