This field needs a lot of loving and, if done well, enables huge leaps in healthcare access and transparency.” As we notice now that a few of our colleagues offer reimbursed services, it all takes so long and requires a lot of work to make it run. “Yet, the infrastructure for this is often burdensome for everyone involved in these three-way exchanges: the provider waits for the customer, who waits for their insurance, who waits for a document that may never come. There is no getting around this essential horizontal layer,” Debong says. “Money is the glue of our healthcare systems. When it comes to the horizontal plays, Debong sees two big categories. “I do help and connect with island plays, too, but I refrain from investing in such solutions nowadays.” They are the more interesting pieces, where more investment is needed,” he says. “These are the two big things coming at us, I believe: deep vertical plays and the horizontal plays. A deep vertical, meanwhile, involves a technology “starting with the patient experience, going all the way down into the health economics and the machinations of society,” Debong says. You have to either change a horizontal layer of the ecosystem or craft really deep vertical, where you control and thus can work through the kinks of multiple layers yourself.”Īn ecosystem layer is a technology that has the capacity to enable a broad swathe of healthcare operations, often a data management or infrastructure play. Many are coming to the realisation, like I did, that just building an island of a solution is nice, but it’s not going to be huge.
“But the system and view on the field is changing. There are enough of us who know what can be done now,” he said. “I think it’s going to grow, but we’ll see more mature plays. Some high-profile misses aren’t a reason for pessimism about the ecosystem, Debong says – just realism. “And those bets or leaps of faith based on spreadsheets and PowerPoints, not actual experience – they land you in hot waters.” “I believe that many big companies enter the field because it’s a “big market” and they have McKinsey and MBA students saying they need to do something in there, not because they want to strive to have a huge healthcare impact,” he says. And he’s not surprised that this year we’ve seen big bets like Amazon Care flop. And in health care you can’t cut corners, “ he says.ĭebong knows a thing or two about how hard it is to build a healthcare company with real value. We are right now at the stage where we’re beginning to realize that, all right, we can build something and launch it on a broader scale, but it’s really hard to make it super big and impactful without cutting corners. “Also, one or two IPOs and mergers in the US haven’t really panned out to be epic for healthcare or financial outcomes. “Yeah, there’s been a lot of hype driven by public reimbursement for digital health, as well as simple things like symptom checkers, that aren’t very impactful unless they’re ecosystem plays,” Fredrik Debong, a health tech investor, cofounder of mySugr, and Frontiers Steering Committee member, tells pharmaphorum. This may not be cause for alarm, however rather, it’s the end of Gartner’s “peak of inflated expectations” and the beginning of a realistic equilibrium. Yet, as the virus has abated and the economy has slumped, investment has cooled off. Here we talk to Fredrik Debong, who cofounded MySugr in 2012 and sold it to Roche Diabetes Care five years later in an eight- to nine-figure deal.Ī cooling off in digital health investmentĭigital health saw a major investment boom the last few years, egged on by COVID-19, as well as by the natural maturation of the market. As we enter October and the Frontiers Health 2022 conference in Milan, we’re shining a spotlight on some of the Steering Committee members who have helped make the event what it is.
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