coming from wearable devices, therapeutic devices and diagnostic tests. For example, a cardiac patient might have data coming from a Fitbit, an implantable biventricular pacing device, and enzyme and cholesterol lab results. Behind the scenes, there’s a critical need for open data architecture that lets the data flow together seamlessly, which enables physicians to access the data efficiently.
Several clinical areas such as cardiac care (Medtronic CareLink), diabetes care (glooko), sleep disorders (Somnocare) and asthma (Propeller Health), lend themselves to providing clinicians with a more efficient way to assimilate and manage patients in the context of their real-world data.
In diabetes care management, glooko, a Canaan portfolio company, is focused on aggregating the clinical data associated with patients’ day-to-day disease management: insulin delivery, fitness parameters, and glucose readings. The data flow into a dashboard that both physicians and patients can utilize.
Beyond what the patient and doctor see, the glooko platform may also offer drug companies a way to better understand patient outcomes with respect to patient compliance with drug regimens—based on actual glucose readings, not patient-reported journals, which for decades have been the standard way for patients to report their own behavior. This could be the beginning of a new era where pharma and med tech companies drive “digital therapeutics” through enhanced analytics surrounding their products and services.
I would be remiss not to acknowledge many risks, however, in digital health markets. There are long sales and implementation cycles when it comes to health care providers. As we like to avoid in venture, a digital health startup can spend all of its days in “pilot mode” setting up proof-of-concept sites with the hopes of converting pilots to customers with broad product adoption.
Questions on payment also loom large. For example, will providers at risk, such as accountable care organizations, pay for these real-world clinical data in order to decrease the cost of managing high risk patients? Will payers provide reimbursement for digital health offerings? Will drug companies buy into these solutions as a way to drive drug compliance among their patients and to prove pharmaco-economic superiority over their competition to insurers and payers?
(To reduce the overall reliance on payers and providers’ pocketbooks, Canaan has shifted focus to models where pharma and med tech giants partner in digital health offerings.)
These are the sticky issues when it comes to driving deployment across traditional lines of IT silos. That said, the potential value of companies that can use digital technologies to create better outcomes, better value and better care is too exciting to ignore.