HealthManagement, Volume 19 - Issue 3, 2019

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The FT Digital Health Summit, is a one-day conference focusing on how innovation can help address healthcare’s increasing bottom line and how the issues of security, engagement and fragmentation can be tackled.

 

Now in its fifth year, the summit brings together leading speakers from the patient, hospital manager and practitioner, investor and innovator fields to discuss how technology/innovation are meeting and addressing the growing challenges facing healthcare.

 

The agenda is simple: where and how can digital technologies, devices and applications, and the data they produce have the most meaningful and effective impact within patient care?

 

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“People’s perception of the healthcare sector can be very niche,” says Daniel Mahony, Healthcare Fund Manager of Polar Capital Partners and summit speaker. “It is often focused on the big pharma companies who can be seen driving the news agenda. The reality is that there are a variety of themes, innovations and developments happening in the healthcare sector and events like these help us to communicate the exciting investment opportunities available.”

 

The FT Digital Health Summit will explore ways to implement digital transformation and improve the impact of innovation. Some of the key topics on the agenda are the hospital of the future, the challenges of security, engagement and integration in digital health and the role of preventative solutions in promoting wellness and collaboration as a catalyst for transformation.

 

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An additional key focus area is the ongoing issue of finding the skills and leadership needed to spearhead transformation.

 

“Based on almost 15 years of experience from health sector, I still feel that professional mindset, and clinicians lacking interest of technology is still a main issue for big breakthroughs,” says Jaana Sinipuro, Project Director at the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra and speaker at the FT Digital Health Summit. “In order to adjust technology to serve people, and not opposite, we need to motivate clinicians and healthcare professionals to become curious about technology and make them innovate together with tech professionals.”

 

Industry is also on the agenda with a look at best practices for closing the gap between product development and adoption and the critical need to move pharma into the digital age.

 

“In the Life Science industry, more and more pharma companies are willing to invest in generating new data sources for real world evidence. Real-world data, together with patient reported outcomes is needed to implement value-based healthcare practices. The Life Science industry is working on new collaboration models with authorities and societies,” says Sinipuro.

 

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‘Data could be described as one of the healthcare sector’s biggest catchwords at present and rightly so - the potential it holds to transform both practices and processes and patient outcomes is revolutionary. Harnessing this potential in practical and practiceable ways is another theme of the FT Digital Health Summit.

 

“Rising costs of healthcare, due to ageing population and cost-pressures from targeted medicines, will maintain the focus in data interoperability and skills and tools to enable better use of data and analytics,” says Sinipuro. “It will be necessary to find means for data exploitation and combining different sources of data, like measuring patient reported outcomes, combining personal data to clinical data and evaluate direction towards value-based healthcare.”

 

Looking to the future, an industry event on healthcare cannot ignore the impact Artificial Intelligence (AI) is also having and will continue to have on processes and patient care.

 

“We are entering a new phase of structural disruption that is not just about a new therapy – be it drug or device. The next phase of disruption requires a realignment of interests across the value change and relies on collaboration,” says Mahony.

 

The FT Digital Health Summit takes place in Berlin on June 18, 2019. For further details go to: live.ft.com/DigitalHealth

 

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