Health Innovation Summit: CEO Day 3 Recap

The final day of Health Innovation Summit went by in a flash, with founders and leaders from payers, hospitals, startups, academia and the government.  Five early startups demo’d their new products and eight growing startups were featured in the “Hot & Hiring” career fair. Here’s a run down of the day:

Cultivating Admiration in Brands: The Dragonfly Effect
Jennifer Aaker, Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business

Using a very emotional case study to illustrate the “Dragonfly Effect”, Aaker showed the power of a focused effort to save two lives, that in the end saved almost 300 others. Her advice in cultivating admiration: Act nimbly. Be human centered. Foster a culture of optimism. Design for stories. And since all of us are in the business of building long term relationships, it’s best to ask ourselves which ones matter most? What can we build right now, and how can we continue to be nimble in a way that helps us recover when we make mistakes?

CEO Challenges: Reimbursement, Regulation, Research Collaboration
Dr. Sam Ho, Chief Medical Officer, United Healthcare
Simmi Singh, Head of Department of Health & Human Services
Teri Melese, Business Strategy & Development, School of Medicine, UCSF
Ed Yu, Principal in the Health Industries practice at PwC

With varied perspectives ranging from payer to government to provider, themes ranged from incentive alignment to data management to working within the constraints of this complicated system.

Dr. Sam Ho quoted Tom Nolan, PhD:

“The root of the problem in health care is that the business models of almost all us health care organizations depend on keeping these three aims [Improve the individual experience. Improve population health. Control inflation of per capita cost.] separate. society on the other hand needs these three aims optimized (given appopriate weighting on the components) simultaneously.” – Tom Nolan, PhD

Funding Mechanisms for Digital Health Startups
Rowan Chapman, Partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures
Anne DeGheest, Co-Founder & Managing Director, HealthTech Capital
Zina Moukheiber Contributing Editor, Forbes
Jennifer Shieh, Science & Technology Policy Fellow at NIH
Halle Tecco Co-Founder & CEO, Rock Health

Our women-led panel talked about everything from filling the gap between the incubator and VC funding, the lack of exits in HealthIT, and even the FDA. Key for everyone developing products: The physicians are no longer the ones controlling health products. And the panel left us with a few questions for entrepreneurs to ponder: How do you make money, who is going to acquire it, how much money do you need, and can you get a 10x return?

Creative Disruptions: How to Thrive in the Coming BioRevolution
David Ewing Duncan, Best-selling author of Experimental Man

David talked personalized medicine and genetic markers, via his project, the Experimental Man. With testing grounds as diverse as caffeine and mercury, he dove into the effects of each on the body, to scary result. Example: he tested his mercury levels before and after two meals involving fish. The result? The levels skyrocketed. His new project is Ecoeos, whose first focus is personalized mercury testing. So what else is needed? A revolution in interpretive tools as well as a new ecosystem to wrestle down data and make sense of it.

Moneyball for Medicine – Health Business Models
Linda Avey, Founder of 23andMe, Curious
Dave Chase, Co-Founder & CEO, Avado
Ron Gutman, Founder & CEO, HealthTap
Jennifer Wong, Founder & CEO, Alt 12 Apps

Business models, business models, business models. From revenue sharing to payers to consumer subscription, no stone went unturned. Dave set up with a great overview of the perceptions of the market as well as entrepreneur perspectives on who pays for their products and services. Through the research we did in an earlier Rock Report, we discovered that where investment dollars are going and the monetization models that entrepreneurs are building are almost completely reversed.

Innovation Showcase
We were thrilled to feature demos from 5 disruptive startups (Docphin, Habit Labs, LUMOback, mscripts, Pipette) in the innovation showcase. Each startup pitched to investors and media, so look out for coverage and check out these exciting new companies.

Hot & Hiring
And speaking of exciting startups who have been around a bit longer and are also growing quickly, the following startups are scaling quickly and need talented developers, designers, marketers to join their teams. See below for links if you’d like to throw your name into the hat.
Azumio
GreenGoose
HealthTap
Lumoback
mscripts
Proteus
Skimble
WellnessFX

And of course, as any good conference does, we ended with a happy hour celebration.  Thanks for coming, we’ll see you next year!