Healthcare costs keep rising while digitization lags. In this DLD Health session, Sebastian Wossagk (Action Capital Partners), Roland Bruns (BARMER) and Yannick Wiesner (viatolea) discuss how startups, investors and insurance providers can navigate regulations to finance more effectively and integrate digital innovation into the healthcare system.
“Digital innovation may help to reduce cost and at the same time improve patient care”, Wossagk notes. Scandinavian nations have seized the opportunity, studies show, but nations like France and Germany have fallen behind.
Startups face in healthcare face many hurdles, including fractured markets and regulation. “The system is very inhomogeneous, not only across countries, but even within countries”, Wossagk observes. “There’s a lot of regulation, there’s a lot of compliance issues, patient data is fragmented”, he says, and there’s a “lack of interoperability” between IT systems.
Roland Bruns shares the perspective of BARMER, one of Germany’s largest health insurance providers, which uses three levers to drive innovation: venture‑capital investing, partnerships with startups such as viatolea, and an internal ecosystem built on electronic patient records. “It’s like a puzzle to find the right piece and the right idea”, he says, and then get from prototype to “how can we combine it with our own patient journeys”?
Yannick Wiesner explains how viatolea helps patients “detect and treat food intolerances” using a “smart food and symptom diary” that combines automation with support from dietitians. By partnering directly with health insurers his company avoids some bureaucratic obstacles, Wiesner says.
Watch the video to explore the session in detail.
