Last week, I had the pleasure of participating on a panel sponsored by Boston Consulting Group and moderated by BCG’s Managing Director and Partner, Nate Beyer. The other panelists were Edward Cox, Head and GM of Digital Health and Medicines at Pfizer; Sanskriti Thakur, Chief Growth Officer, Medable; and Kapil Parakh, MD, PhD, Medical Lead at Fitbit, a Google company.
The premise of the discussion: Capital investment in digital health has increased exponentially over the last five years, resulting in a strong ecosystem of health tech companies and talent. The decline in funding this year has created an unparalleled partnering opportunity for corporates pursuing growth in health tech.
Nate kicked off the conversation with a hypothesis: “Disruptive solutions require partnerships. Even a single solution will require a team effort.”
All of us agreed. Kapil pointed out that it’s in Google’s DNA to partner. And Ed reminded us that healthcare is so much more complex than other industries—even within one pharmaceutical company there are multiple (and different) stakeholders, delivery modalities within different therapeutic areas, making it critical to partner.
That was a driving force behind establishing the BrightInsight Ecosystem last year, which includes leading companies with expertise across the digital health innovation lifecycle from investment to strategy to technology to go-to-market.
At BrightInsight, we use partnerships to add value and capabilities. And the partnerships themselves can also be differentiators when combined with the core functionality that you own. No company and no technology can transform the entire healthcare system on its own. It takes an ecosystem of partners to drive systemic transformation of healthcare. By partnering with global leaders from across healthcare, the right network of companies with the right mix of capabilities can enable digital innovation, scale and adoption.
Post-COVID, there are multiple drivers making 2023 and beyond different from the past:
This increased consumer comfort with technology (and to some extent, expectations for connectivity and a more holistic experience), coupled with increased bandwidth is requiring healthcare to develop solutions that meet the patient where they are.
At BrightInsight, we really believe we offer the best of both. We focus and invest in building the BrightInsight Platform with best-of-breed components, our core platform microservices, and layer on top our pre-built suite of solutions, such as our Disease Management Solution, to form the most compliant and scalable platform with a technology stack that powers complete digital health solutions for the world’s largest biopharma and medtech companies.
With ease of configuration, building on the BrightInsight Platform allows for rapid scale across brands and geographies, saving time and development cost.
For instance, we are the underlying infrastructure for Sanofi’s digital solution that will be launching later this year for one of its blockbuster drugs. There are around a dozen other players plugging in and out of our infrastructure.
For our ecosystem to be successful, we must partner to win together. On the business side, partnership success requires aligning the value each partner creates with the value they collect. There’s a small number of best of breed players who can drive incremental and differentiated value. That shared value is distributed across partners, and aligns all of us toward the ultimate goal of step changing patient experience and outcomes.