Robin Hackney is Chair of the Digital Health Society for the Technology Association of Georgia, one of the nation’s most influential technology associations. She’s also a fellow ex-IBM Software Group leader, and has been CMO of 5 digital health companies. We are the lucky recipient of Robin’s recent speaking appearances where she provided an overview of the digital health landscape in a talk she has titled “Digital Health Today and Tomorrow.”
This is not the first time I’ve had a 10 Minute Strategy speaker bring so much informed content that we had to break our 10 minute rule. It won’t be the last either. Topics we cover include:
— Digital health terms
— Types of digital health applications and users
— The digital health category landscape
— Challenges to digital health providers and users of the technology including healthcare providers, hospitals, nursing staff, patients, unpaid caregivers and more
Click here to watch Part Two of our interview.
Click here to watch Part Three of our interview.
About Robin Hackney:
Robin is an experienced technology marketing executive with over 20 years of leadership experience driving marketing efforts for growth and mature stage companies. A serial CMO with focus on Private Equity-backed SaaS software companies, she uses her expertise across marketing disciplines to enhance brand strategy, operationalize demand generation efforts to drive growth and build high-performing marketing teams. LinkedIn.
Transcript of part one of Robin Hackney interview:
Peter Propp: Welcome to another episode of 10 Minute Strategy. My name is Peter Propp and I’m here today with an old friend of mine, Robin Hackney. She is an expert marketer in the area of digital health and right now she’s the chairman of the Digital Health Society of the Technology Association of Georgia which has been around a long time and has influenced a lot of technology decisions across the country for many years. So it’s quite an important group. Robin thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us today.
Robin Hackney: Digital health is something that matters to all of us as individuals even if we don’t work in digital health. It involves a wide variety of healthcare activities facilitated by digital technologies. The audience using digital health might be the people delivering healthcare services, the patients, the researchers, and the investors so there are a lot of different audiences and really digital health can help in a wide variety of ways.
From delivering healthcare services, to monitoring health and wellness, to managing medical data and developing new therapies and treatments, there’s a wide variety of things that digital health can do. It’s used by all those different audiences. Another note I would make is sometimes people will interchangeably use health tech and digital health. Technically they are different. Health tech would be any technology used in a healthcare setting whereas digital health is intended to mean specifically customized for healthcare and used for the purposes of health. Most people use them interchangeably though so I wouldn’t get too caught up in that.
With that background in place, let’s talk about why digital health is important.
– It helps improve access to healthcare services. You can find a doctor, you can find somebody who has an open appointment, you can find out what care you need in order to find those services.
– It really helps enhance the quality of care so when we think about timely diagnoses, more accurate reduction of medical errors, facilitating more patient-centered care, managing and monitoring chronic conditions. About half of the U.S population actually has a chronic condition, so we really need to manage those, identify them early, figure out how to care for them and ideally eventually prevent them. And then the communication between patients and their doctors through patient portals, electronic medical records etc.
– Digital health can help us communicate with our doctors more seamlessly. That can improve the engagement of the patient – meaning we as individuals are more involved in our care and if we’re more involved in our care we’re paying attention then we’re going to be healthier as individuals. We’re going to see better outcomes and really all three of these first items really result in better health outcomes which ultimately is the biggest priority across the board.
That said, digital health does lead to greater efficiencies and cost savings, just as digital transformation has improved results and efficiency in many other industries. I mentioned personalized care and that’s something that’s not just in the digital health arena but healthcare in general. The idea that we can actually tailor our health care, for example, leveraging genomics and custom medications so that rather than taking 12 pills in a day an individual can have a custom pill manufactured to meet their needs. Another aspect of personalized care is improving the logistics. If I’m having a busy day but I need a quick consult with my doctor, do I really have to drive across town to visit my doctor and sit in a waiting room? Instead I can just dial up through telemedicine and have my appointment from the convenience of my desk.
Finally, staying competitive is always important. In addition to the efficiencies and the cost savings by applying digital health to your organization you can actually make your practice more competitive to help you recruit more patients and keep the patients you have. Doctor’s offices that take good care of you and they see you right away versus making you wait for an hour and don’t make you fill out papers over and over are the ones we tend to rely on in the future.
Digital Health has the potential to really transform Healthcare delivery and improve health outcomes for patients while also reducing costs and improving efficiencies for the healthcare providers and the payers. One of the better health outcomes is improved patient safety. As individuals we often think only about the care and oh I’m healthier, but part of that is patient safety and avoiding the horrific outcomes that can happen if a provider does not have the processes or tools needed to focus on safety.
Peter Propp We had a company we’ve been talking with that’s using AI in a digital health assistant to encourage people to submit their symptoms when they’re in extremis to avoid having to go to the nephrologist or avoid having to go to the ER. By using AI they’ve been able to say okay doesn’t seem like you need to talk to the nephrologist sounds like you might need to take some Tylenol or and just rest. Your condition is probably not as big a deal as it might seem like right now. So that’s kind of a pretty good use of technology to reduce cost, reduce stress and improve outcomes.
Robin Hackney Overall, digital Health has the potential to really transform Healthcare delivery and improve health outcomes for patients while also reducing costs and improving efficiencies for the healthcare providers and the payers. We all know that healthcare is such a huge portion of our GDP so it is really important. As we think about what does that mean? Well let’s think about what happens from a business side.
Global digital health is booming and it’s projected to hit over 550 billion dollars in Revenue by 2027. Mid double digit compound annual growth rate expected and the investment in digital health companies has been steadily growing. 2021 was a spike prompted by Covid but even if you took 2021 out and you look at that phenomenal growth rate and the number of companies who’ve received funding it’s massive and they’re introducing more and more solutions and different types of solutions.
There was a recent study of decision makers at healthcare companies who either had existing digital health solutions or were planning digital Health solutions. Here are findings:
– Half of everyone who participated in that survey said they’re working on a solution in the remote patient monitoring or the patient monitoring space so I’ll come back and talk a little bit about that \
– 43 percent were talking about diagnostic Solutions so you might think an MRI or an ultrasound but something that’s testing to see if there’s a condition present
– 41 percent were planning on developing or developing an on body or wearable device
Digital health is receiving a massive amount of investment and creating a really crowded market. I have not seen a legit market map for digital health. Maybe it’s because each digital health category is so deep with players. Sometimes a half dozen or more competitors against a single problem set. So it’s a really crowded and confusing market that’s constantly growing. It makes it really exciting for somebody who works in digital health, but if you’re just entering and trying to navigate it can be really really confusing. End of Transcript 1.