Month: April 2021

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Our Mentors Our Network

Mentor Laura Nelde on Berlin’s strong and supportive digital healthcare world

Laura Nelde

Hailing from Bremen, Laura Nelde moved to Berlin three years ago. A cherished mentor at Vision Health Pioneer Incubator, she’s Flying Health’s Startup Relationship Manager, where she works at the forefront of tomorrow’s healthcare, guiding industry leaders and entrepreneurs and working with startups in-house to develop new digital drugs. She holds an MPhil in Bioscience Enterprise from the University of Cambridge, and speaks passionately about the need for Germany’s wider healthcare community to embrace the technologies and treatments fostered in digital health.

You might also be curious to know that she’s pretty crafty and into DIY fashion. When she’s not working, she scours the web for designs and puts together all sorts of pieces using her grandmother’s sewing machine. As a mentor, she’s appreciated for her open mind, and stresses the importance of intellectual flexibility:

“I always say that what I am offering is one perspective, one piece in the puzzle. You have to speak to so many different people -there are so many stakeholders involved. There are many opinions you have to take into account.”

Curious to learn more on her story and values? Read on:


What do you think are the best steps to take to enter the digital health space?

When it comes to learning about the problem you are trying to address, It’s important to understand the traditional system and the current patient journey. You need to know which stakeholders are involved and how your proposed solution changes the current care path and offers value to all those involved.

It’s also a good idea to talk to experts: People who understand the healthcare system and people who have developed medical products before. Do not underestimate medical device regulations and consider that in your product development from the beginning,

And always keep in mind: the user might not be your customer.

What digital health issues are particularly on your mind at the moment?

Among my many interests, I’m motivated to tackle the subject of how to empower the patient by enabling a wide range of treatment modalities that includes digital solutions– besides traditional options including pharmacotherapy and face to face appointments. This is so that each patient is able to choose the type of care that is most suitable and most effective for them at that point in time.

It’s also important to me to support digital health startups In entering the market, so that they can make new solutions accessible to patients in Germany and allow innovations developed in Germany to stay here instead of leaving for opportunities abroad.

What motivates you to be a mentor?

I love sharing and passing on the knowledge and insights I have gained to support startups/teams that might be new to the healthcare sector. I’m passionate about bringing their ideas to reality as much as I am bringing innovation to the patients, the healthcare system is complex and without support, these endeavors can be difficult.

I also really enjoy meeting teams at an early stage and get excited about learning about new ideas with the potential to transform a part of care delivery. 

How would you describe the digital health space in Berlin– what are its relative strengths and weaknesses? 

Berlin’s digital health community is strong. Its startups rarely see each other as competition, but operate as allies working together to further develop digital health and make it an integral part of our healthcare system.

Before COVID, we also enjoyed all the opportunities we had to attend events and get to know startups and stakeholders. Though now, with COVID, our location is no longer our greatest asset. We’ve lost networking opportunities. But the flip side is that startups located outside Berlin can attend events here.

Did you always want to work in digital health, and if so, why?

I studied economics and management to keep my options open, but realized early on during my studies that healthcare was the area that fascinated me most. I wanted to work in an industry with a significant impact on people’s lives and the opportunity to make a change. 

Digital health, at the intersection of healthcare/medicine and tech had a lot of untapped potential, and seeing founders innovate in this highly regulated and traditional market has fascinated me ever since. This is because this path requires significant dedication and a strong vision and value proposition.

What personal qualities make the most effective founder in this space?

Some of the most effective founders we have met were those teams that combined expertise from science/medical backgrounds and business backgrounds.

This will likely not be a single person, but a founding team that has different backgrounds is tremendously helpful in understanding all aspects of what it takes to build a sustainable business while making sure that the proposed solution is addressing a medical need and built according to medical device and clinical evidence standards.

How do you picture the digital health space in Germany looking in five years?

I Imagine that the underlying national ehealth infrastructure will be widely adopted by then, building a strong backbone for new innovations to be developed and implemented.

I hope that many startups will continue to innovate and work together with existing players across sectors in healthcare to transform care delivery and improve outcomes.

I think there will also be a wide range of apps available on prescription that have become standard options across the treatment spectrum for physicians, and which will hopefully expand beyond the outpatient sector in supporting patients across the care continuum.

What cultural product would you take with you on a deserted island?

I’d want to have access to my favorite podcasts –then I’d have new episodes to look forward to! My top three podcasts are: Alles gesagt, Der Tag and Visionäre Der Gesundheit.

The community at Vision Health Pioneers Incubator goes far beyond its entrepreneurs and includes a diverse network of mentors. Read more about their stories and vision in our special series on them.

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Our Mentors

Mentor, meditator, design thinker, product designer: Introducing Susanne Feldt

Susanne Feldt

“There is real momentum for digital health”

So says mentor, nature lover, avid photographer and gardener Susanne Feldt, who helps healthcare startups develop data-driven products, services, and business models, by raising the bar on customer experience.

Passionate about digital transformation in healthcare, and especially fascinated by applied AI and analytics applications, she’s got some great advice and insights for our growing community.

You might also be interested to know that she once spent tens days in total silence at a monastery in Nepal, an experience she describes as ‘life-changing’.

What do you think are the best steps to take to enter the digital health space?

There is real momentum for digital health. The global community is growing. The healthcare market is quite specific and requires knowledge about challenges and ongoing trends. Try to join online conferences, meetups or social media groups (on Linkedin, Clubhouse, etc) and take part in the conversations. 

Which of your professional accomplishments are you most proud of?

I trained many of my former colleagues and clients to use the user-centered innovation mindset (Design Thinking). Once people understand the value in user-centered-design, they include that in everything they build. It’s hard to believe that people often develop products without ever talking to their customers.

What digital health issues are on your mind at the moment?

Personally, I’m super interested in the use of AI/ machine learning for human-centered healthcare innovation. In my current project, I conduct user research on the brain tumor workflow. It’s a bit crazy, for some rare diseases it often takes a long time until patients get a proper examination. Sadly, it depends on individual healthcare providers (HCP) and their engagement if patients receive the best possible treatment. Treatments need to become more personalized, and therefore HCPs need more time for individual cases. I believe that digitalisation and data analysis can support HCPs in providing better diagnoses and addressing individual needs.

What is the best advice anyone ever gave you?

“You either have to learn it and become the best, or you hire somebody who is better than you.” I’m a very curious person, always eager to learn new skills. But when you are building a startup, you need to learn to handover responsibilities.

What strategies have you used to stay sane and productive through COVID?

I started my freelance UX career just at  the beginning of the pandemic. The decision was made before then, and I couldn’t reverse it. But so far,  it all worked out well. I supported a small founding team with their product launch and we still met in the office until the beginning of winter. As I had this big change planned, the effects on my work due to COVID were minor.

Intellectually the year 2020 was very exciting for digital health. The general public became aware of this topic; people donated their health data for research and tried telemedicine consultations for the first time in their lives. We saw that a lot was possible and that creativity matters in solving problems. 

What are the qualities of an effective mentor especially in this space and what motivates you to be a mentor?

I had a few mentors that inspired me on my work journey. These were always people that took the time to listen to me, even when they were super busy themselves. They did this without asking anything in return; they were purely interested and generous. For the same reason, I want to mentor. I enjoy teaching, problem-solving and connecting people. And I can learn from the startups and their journeys, too.

How would you describe your digital health journey? What have been some of the highs and lows?

The projects I’ve had in healthcare were by far the most interesting projects I had in my design career. It’s pretty exciting to design digital infrastructures for diagnostics. What are the lows? Definitely the strict data protection and compliance regulations; these regulations are often not designed and thought out for digital health applications. The documentation efforts are gigantic; in trials, a code freeze is required and even bug fixing causes problems, overall this makes it hard to develop in an agile setup.

How would you describe the digital health space in Berlin, what are its relative strengths and weaknesses? 

Healthcare is a highly political field. As the government sits here in Berlin, we might have a location advantage in Berlin. The city is vibrant and interesting for innovative startups that develop data-driven tech solutions. The most important health incubators sit in the capital. Germany is definitely an interesting healthcare market with over 73 million public insured people. And within the limits of the GDPR data protection regulation, startups have to design compliant solutions. One weakness is that Germany’s federalism. So regardless of where the startup is, they need to handle this madness of different state regulations.

What have been your biggest challenges in working through a pandemic, and have you found any silver linings?

As I work in the digital field, I’m pretty lucky that COVID did not affect my work that much. I’m used to working with remote teams, and often I had to fly to my clients for short alignment meetings. I’m thankful that we all learned new digital processes and that it matters less where in the world a person is. Now I could live on an island and still do my job. 

Nevertheless, having all these social limitations is hard and I also struggle with this. I wish we find better ways than lockdowns to handle this situation. The insecurity and the difficult (work) circumstances that some people are facing is troubling.

What personal qualities make the most effective founder in this space?

I’m not a founder myself (yet), but I worked closely with founding teams. Successful founders managed to design the value for their stakeholders and users, and in reverse they gained support from others. Engaging others in your mission is crucial. 

In healthcare, this matters even more– proof of concept trials can cost a fortune, though this varies depending on personal connections. Therefore I believe that successful founders need to build long-lasting relationships with research institutions.

How do you picture the digital health space in Germany looking in five years?

Five years is a short time for innovation in a highly regulated field. I see that we finally have the electronic-patient-file and that this leads to more transparency about costs and procedures in the healthcare field. I hope that patients understand that they have a right to participate in the dialog about their health. However, this awareness might take even longer.

The community at Vision Health Pioneer Incubator goes far beyond its entrepreneurs.. We’re grateful to our ever-growing and diverse network of mentors. Stay tuned for more pieces packed with nuggets of wisdom on all things digital health.

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Inside the incubator

Wavy Health’s dulcet innovations are the future of cardiology care

Wavy Health - Startup at Vision Health Pioneers Incubator

Music has a powerful effect on us, but researchers have only just begun to scratch the surface in exploring the extent to which listening to our favourite songs can alter our state of mind and health for the better. This is an area of research with a wealth of possibilities for the healthcare world, and a space that the incubator startup Wavy Health has tapped into to generate a great, multifaceted concept. 

 

Specializing in cardiology, they are creating an application that uses wearable technology, songs and deep tech to treat INOCA, a heart condition that disproportionately affects women, and which can be challenging to diagnose and monitor.

Their app is especially powerful in helping its user identify the sources of their own stress in daily life, which is vital to managing and offsetting INOCA’s symptoms.

Wavy Health’s Lian Kuiper explains the condition as tied to angina pectoris, that is, chest pain –one of the world’s most common heart disorders, with one out two angina pectoris sufferers also having INOCA. 

An accessible app that helps track vital data using cutting edge technology

The perplexing heart condition is short for Ischaemia and No Obstructive Coronary Disease– and manifests when blood supply to the heart is restricted even when there aren’t any blockages in the coronary arteries.

Diagnosis and treatment is difficult and often misunderstood, with its conditions often not showing up on usual tests like ECGs and routine angiograms.

Sufferers can find themselves experiencing what feels like a heart attack only to be told that there is nothing wrong with their heart, and sent home from emergency rooms none the wiser about how to manage their symptoms.

A condition that disproportionately affects women

When their condition is correctly diagnosed, patients can be given medication, and are told to make lifestyle changes– particularly those that reduce stress. One of the many challenges here is a gendered one: two thirds of sufferers are women, and yet, the majority of research centres around the experiences and treatment needs of men. 

This means that when it comes to important matters, such as how much medication a female INOCA patient ought to take, cardiologists are still in the dark.

This dearth of research is one of the reasons Lian Kuiper was curious to join Wavy Health’s mission, which she did at the start of this year, as they began as part of our second cohort.

She joined the startup three years after its co-founders, Steve Thijssen and Daryl Autar, set out creating solutions to heart problems– a pursuit that won his team the top prize in 2018, at Biome, a hackathon held by Norvartis in San Francisco.

Wavy Assistant
The winning team in 2018

While Steve’s background is in IT and business, he took very enthusiastically to the world of healthcare, and especially enjoys the stimulating “craziness” of the hackathon experience. The incubator life is equally electrifying, and his enthusiasm is shared by Lian, the team’s “research queen”.

Steve says that he’s especially pleased to have joined an incubator programme based in Germany, a country that is especially on the ball when it comes to supporting startups operating in this space, in terms of both funding and the degree to which digital health solutions are increasingly afforded legitimacy. This said, the tome of documentation involved is proving a lot of work, and is keeping Lian especially busy. 

The healing sounds of music

While the initial plan had been to focus on heart failure, Steve and his co-founder adapted their approach and mission to first addressing INOCA. 

This new direction was prompted by several conversations with cardiologists, including noted physician Prof. Dr. Angela Maas, who emphasised the role stress management plays when it comes to offsetting INOCA’s symptoms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBOjmusT78Y&t=1s
Wavy Health will use wearable technology to analyze heart rhythms and sharing that data with healthcare professionals

Maas focuses on female cardiology patients, and is attached to the Netherlands’ Radboud University, an institute that now works closely with the Wavy Health team to help provide the data going into a digital health app that acts as personalised medicine for stress reduction.

With a recent new addition to the Berlin team – Simona Sendroiu, a UX designer, and Greek medical illustrator Mano Kapazoglou – Wavy Health now boasts four members in Germany, working together to push the boundaries of what is possible when it comes to treating heart conditions like INOCA, while empowering sufferers to take control of their health.

While INOCA is the focus now, there’s plenty of scope to use their technology to address a range of cardiovascular complaints, including generalised chest pain and hypertension.

“We wanted to focus on one group now, because it’s more specific,” Steve explains.

For now, we’re pleased to see the team employ this focus and hit the ground running, bringing a much appreciated drive, exuberance and the spirit of collaboration to the incubator.

“A startup is like a roller coaster. Sometimes it goes well, sometimes it’s crazy,” says Steve. Lian agrees. “Yes, it’s definitely a challenge, but we make the best of it”.