On this latest episode, we were joined by Joep De Groot, chair of the board at health insurer CZ in the Netherlands.

Joep is very much aware of the limitations of traditional healthcare, especially from a patient perspective. He discerns two major issues:

• Healthcare can be woefully inefficient at times. A common root cause in this case, is the immobility of data. Joep recalls speaking to a diabetes patient, who had to stand in line at the hospital for bloodwork a few times a year as a result of that, when a local clinic could have done the job just as well.
• Healthcare in its current state often fails to properly support patients throughout their journey, both from an educational as well as a psychological standpoint. As soon as people leave the hospital or GP practice, it feels like they're on their own again. Accessibility remains to be an issue for people as well. Joep believes digitalization is the way to go.

Joep has been working on pushing the envelope himself, with the release of multiple applications for the Just ecosystem, a digital-first health insurer by CZ. With several dedicated apps for coaching, physiotherapy and primary care, Just aims to bridge healthcare and insurance altogether.

On this episode we were joined by Isabelle Kenyon and Kim Boyd, two women leading by example to transform the way people receive healthcare.

Isabelle and Kim are at the helm of Calibrate, a virtual care platform designed to help people with weight loss, and take the willpower factor out of the equation.

Calibrate considers obesity an illness and it should be treated as such. But in the analog world, many patients receive generic advice and are then left to their own devices to lose weight. Thus, reducing the weight loss process to a matter of calorie deficits and willpower.

In other words, it's apparent that there isn't really an issue with the quality of care itself, but rather with the way it's delivered to patients. Impersonal, irregular, impractical.

Isabelle witnessed this discrepancy first-hand when she suffered a spinal fracture back in 2015.

Calibrate challenges this status quo by taking the virtual route to increase the accessibility of care and coaching.

Subscribers receive:

• Doctor-presrcibed GLP-1 medication
• Bi-weekly video coaching
• A personalized, holistic curriculum
• Guaranteed medical coverage

This approach allows patient to apply much more gradual changes to their diet thanks to the consistent follow-ups. It also helps them take accountability through coaching sessions and the online community. Small wins add up to big wins over time!

Huge thanks to Isabelle and Kim for joining us this episode. And hats off to them for leveraging technology to empower patients at scale; that's just the thing we love to see.

Western medicine as we know it can successfully treat an abundance of medical conditions, especially in emergency situations. When the root cause is very specific like a broken arm, the treatment is straightforward.

But when the condition is less black and white, especially in the case of chronic illnesses, you might feel left to your own devices sometimes.

Because when the answer comes down to making dietary or lifestyle changes, who’s gonna be there for you every step of the way?

The healthcare professionals themselves are not to blame, they simply lack the bandwidth or resources to provide holistic care over long periods of time.

This episode of our Digital Health Podcast features André Sommer, co-founder of Cara Care. They strive to empower patients suffering from chronic digestive illnesses, and support them on their journey.

To achieve that, they’ve built a mobile companion app that creates a care plan for you, supported by real, in-the-loop experts. In a nutshell, Cara Care creates a tailor-made experience for people with IBS, IBD, GERD, and dyspepsia.

Listen to the full episode to hear André’s story of how Cara Care came to be!

Implementing digital solutions is starting to make a lot of sense in many areas in healthcare. How about ophthalmology though, specifically when treating cataracts?

On this episode, we've got the incredibly well-spoken Mark Vizard, digital health manager over at Rayner. Rayner has always been at the forefront of innovation when it comes to intraocular lenses or IOLs; a lens implant for treating cataracts or myopia.

While cataract surgery generally has a high success rate, there's still a ways to go in terms of patient outcomes and experience. And that starts with gathering and aggregating the right data.

Clinicians are already logging a ton of data through various systems, but not so much in terms of how patients themselves feel about lens replacements in general, nor their reported outcomes after the surgery.

Rayner noticed these patient-reported outcomes could be the missing link in providing optimal patient care.

Hence, they've created two mobile applications to deal with this challenge:

• RayPRO, a system to easily record and analyze patient-reported outcome data following surgery.
• Raytrace, a calculator used by surgeons to find the appropriate lens based on biometric data.

Learn all about why Rayner opted to go for this digital route in this episode of The Digital Health Podcast. Huge thanks to Mark Vizard for joining us and giving us an excellent rundown!

Our guest this week is Tess Cosad, Co-founder and CEO of Béa Fertility, a fertility care startup that's developing safe, affordable treatments that can be carried out at home.

Now in this episode there are a lot of acronyms so let's break it down:

ICI - Intracervical Insemination: Intracervical insemination is a form of artificial insemination that involves keeping semen held against the cervix for an extended amount of time (usually 4-12 hours).

IUI - Intrauterine Insemination: ICI involves waiting in the clinic for upwards of 4 hours until a physician can remove the cervical cap for you. With IUI, you can get up and go. It’s a lot more time-efficient, which is good. It’s also a lot more invasive and expensive, which is not so good

So how does this impact fertility life in practice?

We learn how using technology, fertility treatment can be done in the comfort at your own home!

How? Listen to this episode to learn more.

In the steps towards digitalising healthcare, we have seen major movements in the last couple of years, especially compared to the previous several years. The digitalisation of women's health.

We have recently seen femtech improve and innovate like never before, and these strides are generally focussed around maternity, which is the focus of this week's episode!

Arsi had a great chat with Rosanne Longmore, CEO at Coroflo, the world's first remote breastfeeding monitor. This technology allows mothers to know exactly how much breastmilk mothers are getting.

She taught about the gap in the tech world around monitoring breastmilk and the importance of solving it.

For example, until Coroflo was founded, we never knew how a mother's medication impacts how much breastmilk she produces, and in turn how the baby's diet is affected. Crazy right?

This technology is so ground-breaking that EU Commission has provided funding for it. This allows them to conduct a global study on breastfeeding which provides potential for further studies on this topic.

Listen if you want to learn more about how such global studies are conducted and how two parents who had a challenge, were able to found a company which is among the most important in digital health today.

Communication in hospitals is key, it can impact how much medication a patient gets and what their next stage in treatment is.

So why do we still see so many handwritten scribbles and notes around hospitals? Relying on easy-to-read handwriting and hoping no one accidentally throws the note away!

Then if there is proper digital communication via email or IM, data protection is not taken seriously.

This begs a separate question. The healthcare industry is quite old and somewhat set in its ways. If we do create a new solution, how can we encourage adoption from the healthcare professionals who are the end users?

That is the discussion this week with Dr Phillipp Kurtz, co-founder of Famedyl, a decentralized application that is transforming the way healthcare professionals collaborate and share data.

He discussed how, with the power of push notifications and nudging, they encourage clinicians to take the right actions.

We learned how to get buy-in from the different stakeholders who adopt this technology, and how they created a solution which improved communication in hospitals which makes a real impact.

To learn more about how communication is changing in healthcare and how this new technology is being implemented, check this episode out!

It's a common consensus that breastfeeding has great benefits to children and studies show over 80% of mothers want to breastfeed. Therefore you'd think there isn't many barriers to breastfeeding, right?

But like everything, there is a difference between wanting to do something and being supported to do it.

Unfortunately, there has been a lack of education around this topic. Not around the benefits of breastfeeding, but on the pains a mother will face, misinformation which medication you can and cannot take when breastfeeding and that general p2p support where new mothers can share their thoughts in a safe space...

This week we discussed this topic with Christiane Gross, the international business development lead of LactApp, the first mobile app that provides personalised suggestions to new mothers around breastfeeding and maternity questions.

They have found great success in this solution, and have accumulated over half a million active users globally and have set their sites on being the number 1 player in the femtech space.

We learned that breastfeeding is a space where there is a real lack of public awareness of when it comes to details beyond the benefits, from education in the universities and knowledge made available to GPs.

This episode discusses how a mobile app, created out of a genuine need in the population has had a great impact on increasing confidence in mothers who want to breastfeed, but previously was unsure about how to approach it due to the lack of concrete information available.