Dr. Lucian Iancovici is an investment manager at Qualcomm Ventures with a focus on the Qualcomm Life Fund, a $100 million digital health fund. He manages the fund’s investments in Fitbit and PracticeFusion. This week at HIMSS, Iancovici was a keynote speaker at a venture forum to explore investment trends in healthcare and the different approaches digital health startups are taking to take on pain points in the industry.
In an interview with MedCity News, Iancovici identified a few emerging patterns he sees in digital health centered around mobilizing, organizing and analyzing patient data to catalyze changes in healthcare.
One of the real challenges of digital health is how to integrate it into the healthcare system. As Iancovici points out, it doesn’t matter how well a digital health application works if it can’t help the relationships between patients and their doctors or between patients and their insurers or between doctors and the insurance companies. The adoption barrier will be too high.
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Another challenge is simply managing the apps themselves. Medical devices such as electrocardiograms have become affordable enough to have in a home and can transmit data to a hospital or physician’s office. Other devices can passively capture data to help improve adherence. This trend also has created a huge number of apps that need to be organized. Although Happtique focused on organizing and vetting apps for hospitals, digital health companies such as Human API and Validic are working to organize these apps for payers, providers, pharmaceutical companies and wellness companies.
“[They] are taking on HIPAA-compliancy and connecting all the different apps and delivering them to a healthcare system or partner so that they can pick which apps they want to give within their system,” Iancovici said. “For any individual system to do that on their own is overwhelming.”
In the electronic medical record space he references athenahealth which is using its software-as-a-service platform to help doctors manage their practices better.
“In the insurance space there are some companies that are proactive in this like United Health with Audax Health Solutions as well as Welltok, (a company in Qualcomm Ventures’ portfolio). They are enabling insurance companies to plug in the best-of-kind apps — the insurer pays for it and delivers it to the patient. There need to be these underlying platforms that can speak this language for that to happen as well as the evidence to validate the underlying benefits.”
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Iancovici also pointed out that by taking the most critical healthcare information — claims data and EMR data — and adding another data set — consumer data, social data or genomic data — providers can gain insights to improve the quality of care or begin to address underserved patient populations. Some studies have traced high readmission rates or higher than average emergency room admissions to a few zip codes due to a lack of alternative sources of care in those communities.
