The race is on to create a coronavirus vaccine.
Even as pharmaceutical giants and institutions roll out trials at breakneck speed, many entrepreneurs
are also rushing to disrupt the way we see a doctor and are diagnosed.
This transition that we are in, it started even before the pandemic.
I'm speaking to three start-up CEOs to get the pulse on how they’re evolving the medical
technology industry amid the pandemic.
The world was changing; we had to change as well as a company.
We would like to understand how our device can support early detect Covid or better detect Covid.
The World Health Organization describes medical technology, or medtech, as the use of knowledge
and technology in devices, medicines and procedures to advance human health.
One aspect of that which has been vital lately is telemedicine, or remote healthcare services.
In 2019, the global telemedicine market was worth $45.5 billion,
with projections to almost quadruple by 2026.
With more people staying indoors and social distancing during the pandemic,
there is a growing demand for remote medical services.
We have more than doubled our volumes in a very short time.
That’s a market 32-year-old Swedish entrepreneur, Johannes Schildt, and his co-founders
have been working on since launching their medical video consultation service in 2015.
The platform, known as Kry, or Livi in English speaking markets, connects users directly
with qualified doctors via its app as an alternative to in-person care.
You save travel, it’s very convenient, you don’t have to be in a waiting room being sneezed at.
Now, of course, with the rather sad backdrop of a pandemic, it’s starting
to be painfully obvious for a lot of people that this is a crucial part of their healthcare
infrastructure moving forward.
Between February and April, the company saw demand in Europe surge more than 160%, both
both for Covid-19 queries and general care.
Healthcare professionals, too, are eager to move their services online as a new revenue stream.
There’s definitely been a change from the clinician side, where they are eager to try
out new services and deliver healthcare in new ways out of necessity
because you have to.
That has also prompted the company to roll out Livi Connect, a free basic service,
in response to growing demand during the pandemic.
While healthcare regulators were previously cautious about rolling out telemedicine services,
Johannes says that’s the pandemic has led to a rethink of regulations,
which could accelerate his vision for healthcare.
One of our bottlenecks has been market access, that you’ve had nations that were not
allowed to do telemedicine, and it was not reimbursed.
But this is now rapidly changing across the globe.
On a policy side, I think a lot of this is here to stay and it has opened the eyes for
a lot of people and entities that what we have been doing for five years is a really good thing.
Elsewhere, some developments have come about almost by chance, according to Harpreet Singh Rai,
CEO of Finnish smart health tracker Oura.
The wearable, a titanium ring, was released in 2015 to give people a picture of their overall health score
by monitoring their movement and sleep, among other functions.
A drop in the scores could be an early predictor of an illness, and even pre-empt the flu season.
As it turns out, the ring was also able to detect Covid-19 symptoms up to three days
in advance with 90% accuracy.
This all started on March 11th.
A user of ours made a Facebook post detailing actually what happened.
He saw changes in his Oura ring data.
He had been traveling in the prior days and he decided to go get a test for Covid.
Turns out he was positive. And then he detailed it. He described himself as asymptomatic,
which he thought made this virus so dangerous, and told people about his experience with Oura
and seeing such meaningful changes in data that allowed him to understand that he may be sick.
Now, the company is finding ways to use telltale data, such as body temperature, sleep patterns
and heart rate variability, to help detect cases among frontline workers and general users.
We've obviously since then seen businesses who are interested as they try to figure out
how to reopen this economy. The Las Vegas Sands actually was our first customer.
Given what was happening, we just wanted to figure out how we could help.
That includes partnering with athletes to get the sports calendar back on track.
In June, the NBA bought more than 1,000 rings, which cost upwards of $300 each,
as their season resumes.
We work really, really hard with both the NBA and the NBPA, which is essentially their union,
to make sure that players felt secure about their data. And so what we did as a company was,
cleverly, our team came up with this idea of a risk score.
It’s an aggregated view of the probability of risk. And if someone is really elevated on the risk score,
they then call the team medical doctor and they suggest that a second test be done for Covid.
With finite tests currently available, and the costs still high, it’s important to
find alternative means of collecting data on the virus, too.
That’s where Lea von Bidder, co-founder of women’s health company Ava, comes in.
The Swiss company’s flagship product, the Ava Bracelet, launched in 2016
to help women track their fertility cycles.
Ava the bracelet looks like this. I wear it right now. It picks up three million data points per night.
Breathing rate, profusion, skin temperature, heart rate.
Over the years, the tracker has helped more than 30,000 couples get pregnant in Europe and the U.S.
But now the 30-year-old CEO and her team are using Ava’s anonymized data to figure out
how the coronavirus impacts women specifically.
What’s really interesting with us coming from this fertility, menstrual cycle background,
is that we understand the ‘normal’ for women really, really well, which is important
now when we look at Covid.
And what might that mean for women and pregnancy specifically?
In the past, we’ve often had the issue where women weren’t included in clinical studies
because they were quote, unquote ‘too complex’ for whatever was studied.
I think in this case, specifically, it’s really important to look at what changes already happen
in order to really understand what’s happening with Covid and women.
Meanwhile, the multi-sensory bracelet is being put to use in various pan-European studies
to monitor symptoms of the virus on broader cross-sections of society.
We started in March our first clinical study to see if we could early detect symptoms of Covid.
A few weeks later, we got a rather large grant in Europe to run a very large
study with 40,000 participants using our device to monitor symptoms. And this is not only
focused on women. It’s also not only focused on fertility or pregnancy. It’s really a
broad study where we give our bracelet and our technology to a larger cohort to really
understand what we can learn out of the data for Covid.
While it’s not yet clear what role these innovations will play in the fight against
Covid-19, the way you keep your health in check in the future could look very different.
Consumers know now that these devices have gotten more accurate, the health applications
can be greater and greater, and I still think we’re pretty low penetration. You know,
if you look the value of that, the value of knowing that you may be getting sick and then
protecting yourselves from spreading this and protecting your loved ones and your fellow colleagues.
I mean, that’s huge!