TWIST Talk: The Future of Healthcare
The future is approaching more rapidly than ever. From transport and energy to finance and manufacturing, exponential advances in new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) are transforming some of the most conservative industries worldwide and are changing the ‘rules of the game’ allowing new players to enter and take over these industries. It is a time of great opportunity and great risk for the healthcare industry and their established players.
Currently, healthcare is largely inefficient and not fulfilling the needs of the patients but also the healthcare providers. We are seeing constantly increasing healthcare costs while patient outcomes remain insufficient. At the same time, developing new drugs becomes more and more expensive with fully-loaded total costs exceeding USD 2bn for a new drug. Hence, the current economic model is unsustainable given the dramatically increasing costs to bring a new medication to the market while the prices for new drugs are under pressure by healthcare systems. At the same time, we see an explosion of data (from ‘omics’ to patient-generated health data) which requires a fundamentally new approach to healthcare.
Therefore, there is no doubt that the next big industry poised for radical disruption by new technologies like digital health and artificial intelligence is the healthcare industry.
The presentation will provide an overview of the major challenges and trends in healthcare, highlight specific innovation examples like novel digital physician / patient communication platforms and AI in pharmaceutical drug discovery & development based on the presenter’s own experience and active involvement, and discuss a roadmap to the future of healthcare.
About Ulrich Mühlner
Ulrich Mühlner is a senior healthcare executive with 20 years of industry experience. In 2016, he became an active startup investor and entrepreneur to enable life-changing healthcare innovations by joining forces with scientists, innovators, and entrepreneurs, and - together - translating groundbreaking ideas, discoveries, and inventions into services and products that make a real difference to people’s lives. Dr Mühlner is particularly passionate about transforming the healthcare industry towards personalized and value-based healthcare through Digital Health solutions, in particular in the areas of Connected Care, Patient-Generated Health Data (PGHD) / Real World Evidence, and Artificial Intelligence / Deep Learning. To fulfill this mission, Ulrich Mühlner co-founded docdok.health to develop docdok, a GDPR and HIPAA compliant cloud based solution connecting healthcare providers with their patients in the clinical and study ecosystems, 24/7, on all devices enabling to capture objective real world data (RWD) in addition to subjective patient reported outcomes (PROs) while significantly benefiting both patients and doctors. He also serves globally as board member and advisor to biopharma and digital health / health tech companies (e.g., E-Medicus, Insilico Medicine, Medicinisto), as well as international organizations and leading academic institutions. Ulrich Mühlner is a frequent speaker and panelist at international biopharma, medtech, and health tech / digital health conferences.
Previously, Dr Mühlner worked at Novartis and Boston Consulting Group (BCG). At Novartis he served as Director and Head Global Corporate Strategy, Global Head Digital Health / Healthtech Partnerships. In these roles, he was responsible for the multi-billion dollar portfolio transformation strategy and spearheaded globally the digital health activities across Novartis leading to major digital health partnerships (Google/Verily, IBM, Proteus) with the aim to better serve patients while increasing the value of the Novartis portfolio through ‘beyond-the-drug’ real-world outcomes solutions. In total, Dr Mühlner successfully executed partnership deals with a volume of $350mn. Dr Mühlner studied Biochemistry in Hannover and Munich, and earned a PhD degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology based on his research on molecular mechanisms of cancer development at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (I.M.P.) in Vienna.