Fenwick Investor Summit Recap
On Friday, we cohosted Fenwick & West‘s first investor summit focused solely on digital health, designed to provide investors a platform on which to discuss and share what they believe to be the future of the space. Held at Fenwick’s beautiful new space in Mountain View, we were joined by a number of top notch speakers with backgrounds spanning consumer, enterprise, design and beyond.
We kicked off the day with a keynote from Dr. Daniel Kraft. He gave an overview of the system from his perspective as a physician, from his days as a resident at Mass General to his fellowship at Stanford, and in his current role as the Executive Director of FutureMed. He highlighted several parallel learnings from his experience as a fighter pilot that he believes will drive the future of medicine:
- Checklists (Made famous by Atul Gawande, having a set system that allows more consistent checks and procedures)
- Simulation (Dry runs of medical procedures help to increase safety, provide unlimited opportunities to practice and make learning- and practicing- more safe for patients and physicians)
- Cockpit (How you present data–and interfaces–matters)
- Radar (Know where people are, track patterns)
Daniel was followed by Aimee Jungman of frog design, who shared her practices of meaningful engagement, which include building products and companies that are present, real, compelling and transparent. She also emphasized passivity, illustrating this by a great quote from the founder of Wesabe, who explained why their more active approach lost to Mint.com
Mint focused on making the user do almost no work at all…. I was focused on trying to make the usability of editing data as easy and functional as it could be; Mint was focused on making it so you never had to do that at all. Their approach completely kicked our approach’s ass.
The next speakers, Anne DeGheest of MedStars and Sundeep Peechu of Felicis Ventures, spoke about consumer products and services, emphasizing that finding the right person to invest, someone who really understands your vision, is one of the most important parts of the investment process. Sundeep also dove deeper into the mobile application space, sharing that winning apps are mobile first, and although most consumers are willing to pay for apps, it’s not as much as we’d like.
We then switched gears to enterprise products and services, where Bob Kocher of Venrock shared a few key insights into the current market, which include:
- Demand for hospitals will fall
- Labor productivity will improve
- Doctors will be paid for performance
- Better functioning markets overall
Lisa Suennen expanded upon the topic, mentioning that two big areas of focus moving forward will be aligning the healthcare system’s broken financial incentives, and creating accountability for behavior and results.
Closing out the day were four great startup demos from up and coming digital health companies:
goBalto – developing new generation web-based solutions that simplify how clinical trials are conducted in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries.
HealthTap – interactive health network dedicated to personalizing health information and providing free online and mobile answers from thousands of physicians
Orca Health – produces applications aimed at educating patients and helping them find the most effective treatment for their ailments, powered by content contributed by certified doctors.
Sano Intelligence – developing a powerful mobile health monitoring product that will reveal new insights about stage-zero care
