hello and thanks tuning in i'm holly shields welcoming to another edition of kalkine tv's
executive corner expert talks today we'll be shedding a light on capsule the company that
enables the systematic use of healthcare data and the best way to do that is to sit down with the
ceo of mr david chen david thanks for joining me great to be here holly and thanks for having me
it's a pleasure to have you on the show first and foremost i'd love to know
what would you say is some of the big issues facing the healthcare sector at the moment
well um the healthcare sector is having some huge challenges as as we all know in recent years with
the coped and the huge vaccination drive um but what i will say is that um there's been
a lot of progress in the global healthcare system especially when you consider where we're coming
from and say the turn a millennium um but that being said no health care system is perfect so
there's a lot of work to be done and um one one of the things that we refer to here at capsule is
what we call the three a's and that's affordability accessibility and authenticity of
health care and medicines across the world um so when you consider how the world can improve its
uh or how the global health care system can improve it's really driving forward
those three things um and the way you do that is through a mixture of methods it could be um both
legally or it could be through innovation and technology which is our domain right it's
interesting that we have that uh criteria that they do sound quite basic and yet they are so
crucial i mean accessibility affordability and uh the third one there i believe was
authenticity what does that that final one mean there yeah so um this one is more specific to
um developing markets and one of the reasons why capsule was founded because what you
often have in developing markets is a case where you have a lot of counterfeit
medicines that could be circulating in the system and you also have quality assurance
which can be an issue so making sure that medicines are kept in the right conditions
so that by the time that they reach patients actually working because that is a huge issue
in some of the markets that we've decided to focus on right that does make perfect sense
there i think that's a very important component component rather especially for the markets that
you are choosing to uh to focus on there so can you maybe shed some light for us on these specific
solutions that you provide through your tech and uh your systematic market insights as well
yes so um that's a very big question i i think i'll start um with the the second part of the
question on the market insights um so when when looking at the um global healthcare
um space there's a lot of a lot of different nuances depending on the markets in which you
work in and each one has their own nuance and complexity so i won't pretend to have
uh the answers for everywhere across the world but i i can make more um general
observations and comments what what i have noticed is that there are two types of issues generally
that you notice in the healthcare system the first type is a consequence of the system running itself
and usually it's down to incentives and those incentives could be commercial incentives or how
each individual company or organization works within a larger ecosystem and then on a second
level it's also down to the actual technology and infrastructure in play so in terms of how
we view this we we think that on the first instance on the incentive piece usually the
um issues that you see are a consequence of um the the financial incentives so for instance
you have let's take for instance the u.s healthcare system which um many people across the
world are familiar with one of the major issues that they talk about there is uh the cost issues
and when you look into the fundamental incentives behind that when you have a private sector owned
healthcare institution everyone is incentivized by corporate profits because that is the legal
obligation of everyone who's working within the system so you have doctors pharmaceutical
companies health insurers etc who are all legally incentivized to maximize return for their
shareholders what that results in is obviously you you have to do what's right for your shareholders
and that necessarily isn't right for the patient at the end of the day now one of the ways in which
that's being resolved is through the creation of a different corporate structure um which is
a b corporation which is a unique corporate structure in which you can make a company
um that make company things like values impact on climates environmental protection and so on
as important or even more important than returns to shareholders so then that changes the incentive
structure a little bit more favorable to to the to the end patient or to the uh end consumer
and i'd say the second piece is on the actual
technology and the infrastructure pieces involved now often these were built very
long ago for legacy systems and weren't built with the internet in mind worldwide computing in mind
so you have a large piece of work that needs to be done to upgrade how um technology is used but also
upgrade the thinking about how you use technology to actually drive um drive forward the the um
the impact that you're trying to make or uh drive towards the results that you're trying
to to have um and then that kind of ties into the first part of the question of what capsule
actually does so um capsule is what we say is we are enabling the systematic use of healthcare data
so that that's a very um it could almost be a confusing statement but to take it back to a bit
of context um what we realized is that you can't improve anything without having information and
without information you can't you can't analyze your processes you can't improve your processes
and therefore we've we believe that to have the biggest impact on the healthcare sector we need to
enable people within the healthcare sector to have a view of what's actually going on um so we found
a few unique um problems where we we thought that we can solve the first one was through what we
alluded to earlier when it came to quality assurance and the authenticity of medicines
is actually viewing what is happening in medicine supply chains so particularly in emerging markets
or even in rural locations where you don't have as much infrastructure around it's very difficult
to see what is actually happening to products as it's moving in transit so what we've done
is we've built a suite of applications as well as some iot devices that can actually monitor
the actual product as it's moving through the supply chain until it gets to the end patient and
that therefore making sure that it's kept in the right conditions and reaches the patient in the
highest quality but also we're actually building a map of where the product is going so for instance
in some of the markets we're operating in here you have an issue called parallel importing where
medicines which are destined for one destination can be diverted to another one usually because um
you can sell them for a higher price in another market so you have products going in in unknown
areas and unknown locations so we provide that visibility and tracking there and the second piece
is more about the healthcare data itself so one thing that we discovered is that many hospitals
and clinics have actually digitized to some extent it's just they can't actually do anything useful
with all the information that they collect so they see thousands of patients sometimes per day
or per week and they're collecting all this data about what diseases they have where they came in
from how long it takes to be treated when they recover whether they're paying out of pocket or
via insurer but all of that data is just sitting on the server doing nothing and it doesn't help
inform decisions it doesn't help planning and at the end of the day the hospitals and clinics are
very reactive and responding to issues as and when they come so what we've done is we've done
a what we call tech enablement so firstly building the plumbing to allow data to flow freely between
the clinics to the health ministries and as as well as uh to the likes of capsule and then when
you have that data flow you can do two things one you can start viewing that data and doing reports
and then you can say um this these are the trends that we're seeing this is how we can improve
our operations based on real data and the second thing we can do is actually aggregate data from
many different clinics together in what we call a data lake pull it all together and then you
can have much more uh interesting and insightful um views into the into that data so you can say
plenty right countrywide these are the trends that we're seeing these are the things that are leading
to those trends and these are the impacts that it's having on patients and it can also inform how
you procure medicines how you distribute medicines and and things like that so you can go from being
very reactive initially to very proactive right i mean it sounds like your clients are essentially
able to access that data and put it to work and really compare it in all the fields that need
need to be can need to be compared rather and draw conclusions from that to uh to better their
uh their businesses exactly because uh one of my my old bosses used to say something to me all the
time uh and it's a tweak of a um i think it's a franklin covey statement but what gets measured
gets improved so he was always saying keep clean data monitor your data and then you can improve
things along the way and that's really the mindset that we took into a capsule and to the healthcare
system so we're enabling them to measure things so they can improve them well you're quite right it
sounds like it's certainly been successful as well uh for you so far that line of thinking you've
won several awards i believe which is an incredible achievement uh in the time that
you've been established so congratulations on that and i'd love to know as well what we can look
forward to seeing from capsule in the year ahead yeah so capsule's in a very exciting phase at the
moment uh not only have we been working with some large institutions um it we've done actually a
project in australia funnily enough alongside some great partners in uh hr wallingford as well as nsl
research where we were helping a multinational pharmaceutical company manage their um supply
chain more efficient efficiently by using things like satellite data to make them a lot more agile
and respond to emerging weather threats like the flooding and the bush fires which are wreak havoc
in australia um and those projects will be um kicking off going live and
and will be having an impact um locally in australia and as well in parallel we plan to ramp
up what we're doing here um so i'm based in rwanda in kigali at the moment so we're doing a lot of
work with local clinics here and also uh in the east africa region so it's it's expansion both in
africa and also doing some some delivery of work in australia and essentially we're looking to grow
the team and and have more people join our mission in driving forward the three days so it's it's
growth it's change it's developing new products and and finding ways to address new challenges
very exciting stuff i mean it does sound like you have a massive a year ahead of you there and a
very action-packed one too with a lot of growth on your horizon i can imagine so we do look forward
to seeing that eventual expansion particularly of your team and of the markets you operate in
that's very exciting as well so definitely keep an eye on it but uh with that said thanks very
much for joining us today david it's been really great to have you on executive corner expert talks
thank you so much holly real pleasure to be here it's a pleasure to have you on the show thanks
for your time as well viewers that was david chen the co-founder of kapsule and if you missed any
part of that chat you can catch the full interview on our youtube channel at kalkine media and make
sure to subscribe i'm holly shields reminding you to stay a prize and invest wise of kalkine