SXSW HEALTH 2017: A SEAT AT THE ADULTS’...

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SXSW HEALTH 2017:

A SEAT AT THE ADULTS’ TABLE

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With few mentions of wearables and other buzzwords of years recently past, SXSW Health speakers

and attendees emphasized pragmatism, innovation, and collaboration as keys to health-tech success

SXSW Health 2017: A Seat at the Adults’ Table x mmm-online.com x 2

4 HACK FOR HEALTHA trio of sessions under the #SWSHACKMED banner underscores the growth of health-tech startups

6 VOX POPLeaders from AbelsonTaylor, HCB Health, and Juice Pharma Worldwide share top recollections from SXSW

8 A DOZEN SHOTS IN THE ARM MM&M highlights 12 takeaways from its time at SXSW’s health track

For information about previous MM&M eBooks, visit mmm-online.com. For sponsorship opportunities, contact Doreen Gates at 267-477-1151 or email doreen [email protected].

CONTENTS

T he healthcare industry has long struggled to craft coherent value- proposition messaging and unite

behind it. There has been an almost- willful intransigence when it comes to abandoning time-tested practices and venturing into the wilds of the future.

In large part, that is why the SXSW health event was such a revelation this year. Six years ago, the health track didn’t exist. Last year, it was relegated to a hotel more than a few steps away from the Austin Convention Center. The content sang, but attendees found themselves outside the heart of the SXSW action in order to listen to it.

This year, however, there was a degree of enthusiasm usually associated with Marvel fanboys. Yes, the health track remains a sub-track of SXSW Interactive, but the first two days of the conference had a definite main-event feel.

On the first day, Saturday, March 11, lines snaked outside the two conference rooms devoted to health panels. One panel, Patient-Centric Healthcare: The Future of Health, seemed a particularly big draw and was attended by a wide range of health-adjacent professionals.

A quick peek at badges revealed there were more “mainstream” tech compa-nies and analytics and data players than organizations that typically dominate pharma and health klatches.

Furthermore, there was an unusual and welcome de-gree of diversity, both in the sort of presentations generating buzz and the individu-als steering them. H o w Wo u n d e d Warriors Are Trans-forming Biotech, LGBT Communi-ty Driving Digital Health Innovations,

and 101 on Women’s Health: More Than Fertility are but a few examples. For the first time in the history of gatherings of people, white dudes rocking the blazer-over-an-Oxford-with-jeans look were not the ones doing the majority of the pontificating. Onward and upward, y’all.

On succeeding pages, MM&M will share its major highlights from the health track at this year’s SXSW.

S X S W H E A LT H 2 0 1 7 : A S E AT AT T H E A D U LTS ’ TA B L E

FROM UNDERCARD TO MAIN EVENTSix years ago, SXSW didn’t have a health track. As late as last year, health presentations were relegated to a secondary venue. But this year, packed conference rooms and an A-list slate of presenters generated significant buzz, suggesting that the health-tech revolution has gone mainstream. By Larry Dobrow

For specific coverage of the March 11 sessions presented under the hashtag #SWSHACKMED, including a vox pop of specific recollections from the event, please turn to pp. 4 and 6.

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1. Failing is not an option when it comes to patients

Hacking Your Health: Future or Fail, a panel led by HCB Health’s associate partner and EVP of strategy, Amy Dowell, traced the evolution of the health hackathon. This was more grad seminar than Health Hackathons 101.

Among the best tips: There’s a hack-athon role for pretty much every person in the healthcare ecosystem, including patients (to offer needed real-world perspective on the proposed hacks) and marketers (to focus and frame narratives for presentation to hackathon judges).

In addition, as Farzad Azimpour, M.D., cardiologist, and Ideo Palo Alto director of health, put it, the tech world’s mantra of “fail fast and fail often” might not be the smartest guiding principle when lives are at stake.

2. What health-tech entrepre-neurs need to know

Real Stories of Success from Health Hack- athons, moderated by Robert Palmer, EVP and managing director at Juice Pharma Worldwide, wasn’t as example- heavy as its title might have suggested, and that was a good thing given the volume of insight — even trade secrets — shared during the panel.

Xpress CEO Kimberly Corbitt offered a play-by-play on the glories and frustra-tions that have come with the evolution of her exceedingly ambitious startup.

The details that Corbitt and all the panelists shared were fascinating, espe-cially as they pertained to the human needs all too often shunted aside during the rush to innovate.

3. The pitch and how to sell your startup

Innovators are often not the most adept communicators. This was noted during the panel session The Pitch: Selling Your Disruptive Health Startup, moderated by AbelsonTaylor VP and group creative director Noah Lowenthal.

AT’s VP of experience design, Tristen George, surveyed the parallels between the digital experiences she devises for pharma clients and the narratives health-tech entrepreneurs must create to capture the imagination of would-be investors. Her remarks were amplified by John Heinsen, founder and executive producer at Bunnygraph Entertainment, a seemingly unlikely participant here as a “Hollywood Guy” with stints at Fox and the Academy Awards (as the trans-media producer partly responsible for the famous Ellen selfie).

Heinsen’s stories likening the Holly-wood pitch process to the hoops through which entrepreneurs often must jump were both revelatory and a hoot. Force of personality — and a willingness to deploy it — play a disproportionate role in entrepreneurship.

HACK FOR HEALTH


On Saturday, March 11, a trio of sessions unified under the #SWSHACKMED banner demystified the health-tech startup world and the challenges created by its explosive growth

Panelists (l-r ): Amy Dowell, Monica Stanciu, Aartik Sarma, and Farzad Azimpour

Panelists (l-r ): Robert Palmer, Troy Bannister, Judy Wang, and Kimberly Corbitt

Panelists (l-r ): Shwen Gwee, John Heinsen, Noah Lowenthal, and Tristen George

Behind the scenes

In this video (left ), HCB Health’s Amy Dowell, Juice Pharma Worldwide’s Robert Palmer, and AbelsonTaylor’s Noah Lowenthal share addi- tional takeaways from SXSW, including further thoughts on how the hacking culture can advance healthcare

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWG9UxrBfPQ

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VOX POP

Amy Dowell, Associate partner, EVP of strategy

HCB Health

Noah LowenthalVP, group creative director

AbelsonTaylor

Robert PalmerEVP, managing director Juice Pharma Worldwide

I’m obsessed with medical-device technolo-gies, so I was incredibly intrigued by the new needle-free drug-delivery device from Portal Instruments. Imagine being able to self-administer insulin or an RA biologic without a needle stick. It simply infuses the drug through the skin via a high-powered microjet. Of course this idea was yet another MIT brainchild — they never cease to impress.

I was introduced to a successful entrepre-neur who readily admitted that she often didn’t know what she was doing in many new situations, but she trusted in the power of connecting with the right people to help her as needed. Her honesty was refreshing. It just goes to show you can accomplish anything when you focus on the right idea, give it all your passion, and collaborate like hell.

The votes are in and the top trends (in a landslide) are artificial intelligence and virtual reality. It almost felt as though they were the foci of the entire conference. The practical applications of chatbots are self-evident, but their emerging ability to empathetically deliver contextual health data and drive behavior change is welcome. The emerging twist in VR training is their use for patient-facing tools in pain management.

After our panel on Saturday, an entrepreneur approached us for some advice on how to tell her startup’s story. In just a few minutes we broke down the issues she was facing and identified a possible solution. It was nice to end the panel with a practical application of what we had discussed and know that at least one attendee left with a clearer idea on how to pitch her company.

Heal Thy self! How Tech Improves Health and Self-Care intrigued me. The speakers included two entrepreneurial physicians and the chief medical officer of a health technology firm. The conversation was about a physician- developed website and had a simple premise: Those with more resources at their disposal might benefit from less care. In this era of attempts to control health-care costs, it’s an interesting premise.

I had several interesting conversations with people on the MIT Hacking Medicine team. Rather than taking a strictly academic route to improving lives through health-tech innovations, the MIT Hacking Medicine team runs health hackathons around the world, helping entrepreneurs focus on find- ing unmet needs and filling them with ingenious innovations.

What were the coolest, smartest, weirdest, or otherwise most notable digital-health trends you observed at SXSW 2017?

What is it about SXSW that has made it such a can’t-miss for people in and around pharma and health tech?

What was the most interesting conversation you had at SXSW 2017? What made it so memorable?

SXSW offers the perfect storm of inspiration and connection. There are so many interest-ing new ideas, models, and ways of thinking about the problems we all face in pharma, device, and biotech. I can identify with a speaker on a challenge that I may or may not have recognized, get hit by the thunderbolt of a solution, then have an immediate conversation with the speaker or audience — right there in the moment. It’s incredibly hyper-collaborative.

There are endless opportunities to make unexpected and important connections. Even on a five-minute shuttle ride to the airport I ran into a CEO of a healthcare startup and discussed shared healthcare challenges. Every day is filled with chance encounters. They shape the way I think about creativity and innovation for the year to come.

In the past several years, the health track at SXSW has developed into a major draw for pharma marketers, entrepreneurs, and health technologists. The SXSW health track is now integrated into the main convention hall at SXSW. The ability to see healthcare technology along-side innovations across a wide field of other categories provides interesting opportunities to think about how we can adapt innovations developed outside healthcare.

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Last year’s poster child can often become next year’s cautionary tale. And so it was with wearables. You remember them, right? Judging by the number of Fitbits and Apple Watches adorning the wrists of SXSW attendees, a sizable percentage of the population in Austin certainly did. But as an industry, healthcare seems to have moved on.

Only one session — Accuracy: Consumer Wearables and Research Converge — specifically addressed wearables, while a second —Screen-ing for Heart Disease with the Apple

Watch — touched on it. And the leaders on the former expressed concern about the reliability of data culled from wearable devices.

Maybe it’s fatigue. Maybe it’s the lack of genuine breakthroughs despite 30 months or so of vast predictions that wearables would cause a tectonic shift in healthcare. Or maybe it’s sim-ply a general agreement with what one exec said at SXSW: “[Wearables have become] stuff you use for a few weeks, then throw in the drawer and forget about.” Whatever the reason, the buzz has obviously subsided.

You can read reports about former Vice President Joe Biden’s rousing speech elsewhere (above with his wife, Jill). But you ought to know this: If he can convert even one-tenth of his energy, charisma, and passion into results, we will have a cure for cancer before too long. At SXSW, a get-together that features actual rock stars, Biden blew everyone else off the stage.

Marcus Osborne slid into the new post of VP of health and wellness transformation not long after he played a pivotal role in building and implementing Wal-Mart’s Health Care Begins Here educational initia-tive. Turns out he has plans to throw its weight around — not just in gen-eral health, but also in cancer care.

That effort, as Osborne described it during the first Connect to End Cancer session, will be thoroughly consumer-centric. “To understand our interests, you probably need to understand our perception of the broader healthcare reality,” he said. “More times than not, solutions are designed around the payer or product manufacturer and too often fail from

1/ Where are wearables?

3/ Diamond Joe wows the crowd

2/ Wal-Mart and innovation? More like, Wal-Mart and scale


A DOZEN SHOTS IN THE ARM This year’s SXSW, with more than 70 sessions devoted to the health track, underscored a changing tide in an industry that is prioritizing forward thinking and partnership-minded insights. MM&M shares 12 takeaways

a consumer perspective. They’re not built around consumer needs.”

Osborne added that Wal-Mart is in a better position than most to assess the current state of affairs. “In a given week, more than half of all Americans visit us at least once — and they’re here for an hour per visit,” he added. “We hear, ‘We are happy, but we are struggling.’ Healthcare is one of the key challenges in that struggle.”

Regarding future healthcare plans, Osborne said, “We don’t innovate — we’re not an innovative company — but we allow innovators to scale. [The goal is] to unlock assets with- in Wal-Mart and spin out new ventures that address various health-care needs.”

4/ Coolest visual aid

During March 11’s Real Stories of Success from Health Hackathons, Startup Health’s Troy Bannister shared two of the scorecards his company uses to determine whether it will invest in a given entrepreneur or company. Both scorecards rank eight mindsets on a 1-through-12 scale, taking into account everything from self-awareness and healthy hab-its (for individuals) to a company’s backstory and scalability.

Alas, the scorecards are propri-etary, so we can’t share them. Suffice it to say that Startup Health sweats the details.



During Connect to End Cancer, Columbia Business School adjunct professor and a Rock Health founder Halle Tecco noted: “Mr. Trump has called the FDA slow and burdensome and put pressure on drug compa-nies around pricing. What do you anticipate changing for innovators, patients, and industry? What would you tell him?”

Big questions got big answers.

“I don’t look to authoritarian re-gimes for any sort of task I hope to accomplish. They’re nothing but an enemy to everything I’m trying to do. I’d ask for nothing except for them to step down.” — Jeff Hammerbacher, Hammer Lab

“From what I’ve seen in govern-ment, the civil servants are the ones who make it go. You have to be a little agnostic to what the administration is if you’re going to keep your business running. There’s still some amazing people there.” — Aman Bhandari, Merck

“Scott Gottlieb is a decent guy, more conservative than I am, but he respects the process. People don’t get that the FDA commis-sioner can’t just approve a drug. As for cancer, nothing Trump says about the FDA is true. We ap-prove [drugs] faster than anyone in the world. If you speed things up, patients get access sooner for drugs you know less about. Every regulation has been written in blood and got there because people were harmed.” — Greg Simon, The Biden Foundation

7/ President Trump, to no surprise, provokes strong responses

6/ Doctors, surprisingly, evangelize for transparency on costs

5/ The trippiest time-waster

Let’s face it: Deep dives on healthcare costs and pricing are a tough sell, especially when programmed against sexier topics. So kudos to Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Neel Shah and his cohorts at the nonprofit Cost of Care, which gathers information about healthcare costs. They some-how transformed a session about helping physicians become more savvy about the price of procedures and medications into one of Sunday, March 12’s most thoughtful — even entertaining — presentations.

During Hey Doc — How Much Will That Cost? Shah and lieutenants Drs. Vineet Arora and Christopher Moriates didn’t just rehash the usual

lines about doctors remaining rela-tively ignorant about the costs asso-ciated with drugs and services. They detailed what they’re doing about it.

“No matter how good your doc-tor is,” Moriates cracked, “there’s a question they won’t be able to answer: ‘How much will that cost me? ’ I know, because I’m a doctor.”

“I felt like people who recognized this as an issue were the ones who were the most disenfranchised,” added Shah. “They were the people who have already been burned. It was only a decade or so ago when I was in medical school. I was specifically told that it wasn’t my job to think about this stuff.”

The effect of Refik Anadol’s Infinity Room installation (is that what things like this are called?) was

described in marketing materials as: The “state of consciousness occurs when the immersant’s aware-

ness of physical self is transformed by surrounding themselves [sic] in an engrossing, often artificial

[sic] environment, creating a perception of presence in a non-physical world.”

That’s the long way of saying that the Infinity Room had a mirrored ceiling and floor (we were

asked to wear booties over our shoes to prevent smudging) and intensified their effect via strobe

lights and the projection of swirly-whirly patterns. Five finer minutes have never been spent — at

SXSW or anywhere else.



Machine learning/AI claims this one in a walk. Its case was put over the top by the sheer volume of testimoni-als delivered by tipsy health-adjacent people during after-hours events. The typical exchange of ideas went something like this:

Person 1: “So, what are you down here for? What are you seeing that’s interesting?”

Person 2 [blinks, sways precarious-ly]: “Uh, AI. AI is awesome. Machine learning, too. Machines are learning stuff, stuff about things.”

Person 1: “I’m going to go stand over there now.”

9/ The trendiest trending trend

8/ Quote of the show, alarming-for-industry division

10/ Smartest personTo be clear: Roughly 70% of the SXSW health-oriented panelists could qualify here. But we’ll go with Dr. Jennifer Doudna, professor of molecular and cell biology and chemistry at the University of Cal-ifornia, Berkeley. Her intelligence is borderline jealousy-provoking, which she made abundantly clear during her Interactive keynote on March 11. Making the scientifically imposing topic of gene editing readily comprehensible (and fasci-nating) to a dullard such as this writer is an achievement on par with summiting Everest during December, while wearing slippers.

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12/ Notable no-show

SXSW’s offerings weren’t specif-ically oriented toward the payer community. Still, given its impor-tance to the growth of the health technology sector and how often speakers referenced its members, it’s a bit surprising that so few of them were in Austin. Whatever the rea-son — maybe they weren’t asked or maybe they blew their annual travel allowances on Payerpalooza — their absence was keenly felt.

Perhaps it has something to do with IBM Watson Health’s ubiquity in future-of-health think pieces, or perhaps it’s just jealousy. But man, the Watson doubters weren’t shy about slagging healthcare’s poster child for machine learning, some going so far as to dismiss it as mere self-marketing.

When a Connect to End Cancer panelist brought up the $62 million that the MD Anderson Cancer Center reportedly spent with Wat-son without seeing much in the way of results, the two responses that followed were borderline catty: “[ Watson is] tackling the wrong problem. They’re taking drugs and trying to do Netflix-style matching of drug to tumor,” and “Watson is still learning to be a doctor, but one thing it’s really good at is being a student. It can read everything, but that doesn’t mean it knows everything.”

11/ Welcome to the backlash, Watson

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