Investigo in Digital Health

​On Tuesday 8th November, the Life Science and Pharmaceutical sector of our Investigo Strategy team hosted their first Digital Health networking event at Furniture Makers Hall, near London Liverpool Street. Over forty clients across the digital healthcare space gathered together for an evening of insight and the opportunity to network.

We had the pleasure to have both Jonathan Anscombe and Dr. Mark Lightowler speaking at the event bringing their expertise and thoughts on the current challenges and trends within the Digital Health industry.

Jonathan Anscombe, Partner in the Health and Digital Transformation practices at A.T. Kearney, commenced the evening’s presentations by reviewing healthcare’s journey towards its own digital transformation. Patients are increasingly relying on social media to make informed health decisions and frequently show up in the examination room with an excess of information about their ‘self-diagnosed’ illnesses. Each month 19 million people search the health information website WebMD. Moreover, Wikipedia is now the world’s most popular website for healthcare professionals and is often the first point of reference before they turn to more specialized databases.

He pointed out that by 2020 50% of population will be digital natives and so, healthcare companies need to develop a clear understanding of who their customers are and what their digital profiles will be like at every stage of a product’s journey. Jonathan emphasized that healthcare is experiencing fundamental change in which, just like every other industry, it is the customers who will be driving the transformation.

Our second speaker, Dr. Mark Lightowler, CEO at Phorix Ltd, focused on digital healthcare innovation and the development and adoption of technologies that will change the way we live. Product insight on technology to watch out for from Mark, included devices that will revolutionise how patients will go about day-to-day diagnosis, enabling us to gain visibility over early warning signals, which could be life-saving. Many of these have been transformed into items that we use and interact with on a daily basis. Mark also underlined that curating for people and embedding electronics into everyday objects along with changing how and where care is delivered, offering new ways to prevent, predict, detect and treat illness etc. are some of the best things we can do for our healthcare system at the moment. Every advancement should be focused entirely on the patient outcome.