Faces of Digital Health
F005 How to make employees value health? (Kathleen Harris, Time Warner)
In this episode, you will hear how Time Warner, a global leader in media and entertainment with businesses in television networks and film and TV entertainment, is approaching employee health. Time Warner has more than 25.000 employees around the globe, meaning that the company faces many different country-specific regulations when it comes to the health of employees, what programmes they can offer them and what kind of analysis they can do with the data of the employees.
his year’s big question in healthcare is – can big corporations be the disruptors of the rigid and risk-averse industry as healthcare is?
Amazon partnered with JPMorgan Chase and Warren Buffett, Apple is designing medical clinics, and Uber wants to disrupt ambulances. The healthcare industry is worth close to 9 trillion dollars globally by 2020, and some say tech giants most of all wish to get a piece of this pie. However, the critical potential for the US is a decrease in cost with new solutions and the different approach companies can have towards their employees’ health.
In this episode: Kathleen Harris, Vice President of Benefits at Time Warner.
F004 Tackling mental health with digital health? (Dean Ornish – UCSF; Ritvik Singh – Psyinnovations; Richard Lee – Bravely)
According to WHO mental health disorders are generally characterized by some combination of abnormal thoughts, emotions, behaviour and relationships with others. Examples are schizophrenia, depression, intellectual disabilities and disorders due to drug abuse. Most of these disorders can be successfully treated. This episode explores the characteristics of mental health disorders and why it is so hard to treat them. Hear from three speakers:
Dean Ornish, Clinical Professor in Medicine, President and Director of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute at University of California Sans Francisco talks about the critical aspect of depression, which is the changes in perception that prevent a depressed person to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
The Co-founder and CEO of Psyinnovations Ritvik Singh talks about the broadness of mental health challenges and to which extent digital solutions can help address them.
Richard Lee, the CEO of a startup called Bravely, believes regular 5-minute power calls with peers can have a significant positive effect on individuals wellbeing. This is what Bravely does: short, peer to peer phone support as a replacement traditional psychotherapeutic counselling.
F003 What is the state of digital health adoption in Africa? (Moka Lantum, MicroClinic)
Moka Lantum is an expert on the African healthcare market. We discussed healthcare IT and digital health adoption in Africa. He was nominated as 2016 Top 100 Global Thinker by Foreign Policy Magazine for his work as founder of the non-profit, 2020 MicroClinic Initiative, that recycles t-shirts into baby clothes and donates them to low-income mothers to promote safe delivery and quality post-natal care in rural Kenya. He obtained his Doctor of Medicine training at Faculty of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, University of Yaoundé, Cameroon; a Diploma in Nutrition and International Child Health, from Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden; a Doctorate in Pharmacology, from the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York. He is a graduate of the Masters in Health Care Management at the Harvard School of Public Health, among other things.
F002 Is it possible to improve the health and wellbeing of everyone in the world? (Esther Dyson – Way to Wellville; Steven Krein, Unity Stoakes – Startup Health)
The legendary investor Esther Dyson is not a big fan of technology. She is a proponent of big ideas, demanding projects with a long-term positive influence on society. Founders of StartupHealth Unity Stoakes and Steven Krein are serial entrepreneurs, driving positive change with innovators working on technological and other innovations in healthcare and medicine. At its inception, the idea behind StartupHealth was simple and very, very, very optimistic: to improve health and well-being of every person in the world. If that seemed like a fantasy seven years ago, the organisation came a long way by now. StartupHealth connects 200 companies, so-called transformers, listed in 10 categories or as they call them – moonshots.
In this episode, Esther Dyson explains why she invested in the company in its very early days. She shares her thoughts on how she sees problems society faces when it comes to health and wellbeing. Steven and Unity talk about the past, the future and the positive attitude one needs to keep trying even when things in business get tough.
F001 How long can you live with the help of digital health? (Bertalan Mesko, The Medical Futurist)
Dr. Bertalan Mesko, PhD is The Medical Futurist and Director of The Medical Futurist Institute analyzing how science fiction technologies can become reality in medicine and healthcare. As a geek physician with a PhD in genomics, he is also an Amazon Top 100 author. He was featured by dozens of top publications, including CNN, the World Health Organization, National Geographic, Forbes, TIME magazine, BBC, and the New York Times.
He has more than 100 GB of data about his health and fitness and made different lifestyle changes based on the analysis of the data. Wondering how long he predicts he will live?
You can find, listen and subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or Podbean, or use the RSS feed.
024 Japan: where robots are friends of the elderly (Kyoko Watanabe – Defta Partners; Yuuri Ueda – Health 2.0 Asia)
Japan. The land of anime – hand-drawn or computer animations, a technological superpower with a staggering gross government debt. It accounted for 219% of GDP in 2016. The long-lasting trend of worsening fiscal situation in Japan continues alongside the increases in health and pension spending linked to population ageing which puts the upward pressure on government debt.
If this is not very inspiring a lot of others specifics in the Japanese society are admired by western countries. For example unbeatable longevity. Japan is no. 1 in the world when it comes to life expectancy at birth: the average life expectancy is 83.9 years, 87.1 for women, 80.8 for men.
The ageing population requires new policies and political measurements to prevent economic collapse. According to the OECD Health Statistics 2016, Japan’s total health spending accounted for 11.2 percent of its GDP in 2015, ranking third out of 35 OECD members. Only the U.S. and Switzerland spend more.
Two speakers share their views in this podcast – Kyoko Watanabe – a digital health investor from Defta Partners – a leading venture capital firm focusing on innovative technologies in IT and healthcare and Yuuri Ueda, MD and Director of Health 2.0 Asia – Japan.
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