The Future of Healthtech

From Biodesign thinking and Google’s use of Data to cross functional collaboration across divergent departments at Stanford

The webinar series covered key perspectives relevant for students, researchers, and innovators in Denmark. The first webinar featured Rush Barlett, Chief Product Officer at Lansinoh Laboratories, who focussed on the Biodesign  processas a.  strategy to identify a good idea that can be leveraged in the healthcare system. Barlett particularly pointed at one important learning: “Focus on right unmet need, do not think in terms of solutions to early.” Finding an unmet need in the health cycle and using technology to solve it is an approach that Silicon Valley has leveraged and advanced, and both companies and researchers can beneficially adapt to this approach to succeed in the healthtech space.

To go further in debt with a concrete utilisation of healthtech technologies and needs, Lily Peng, who is at the forefront of Google’s healthcare business, educated  the participants on Google’s approach to healthtech. Some of the most important key takeaways included Google’s use of AI in monitoring real-world performance and diagnosing patients. She mentioned that the use of data and AI to understand disease progression could potentially make better predictions than traditional methods, but more data is needed to build an accurate model – and the question on how this will work and be applied in real life is one of the biggest challenges.

To deliver hands on advise for Danish start-ups and businesses, the third webinar featured Craig Coombs, president of Coombs Medical Device Consulting, who shared insights on how companies can successfully enter the US market taking all regulatory affairs into consideration. This includes FDA requirements, and how the US differ from medical device regulation in Europe in terms of e.g. classifying software and risk analysis.

Lastly, the fourth webinar by Amir Bahmani, Director of Science & Technology at Stanford Healthcare Innovation Lab, focussed on the role of data and the computational side of developing new ground-breaking healthcare solutions. It is all about making the engineering department and the school of medicine communicate and collaborate. An example of succeeding in this included a team at Stanford, where participants had created an algorithm to detect infectious disease via heart rate and temperature. Making these groups work together is key to creating groundbreaking innovation, and with this example of cross functional collaboration, Amir encouraged the audience to break down barriers and create diverse teams that contribute to the innovative process.