Healthtech and the Future of Digital Health

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• Where is the transcript for this webinar?

  Speaker 1:
  Good afternoon, everyone—or, depending on where you’re located, good morning to those of you on the West Coast. Welcome to another presentation by Alumni Ventures. We’re excited to have you join us for this special event discussing health tech and the future of digital health, featuring Chris Coburn, Chief Innovation Officer at Mass General Brigham.

  As always, we are honored to be joined by our very own Lacey Johnson, Managing Partner of our Health Tech Fund. My name is Charles Patricks, Senior Partner here at Alumni Ventures. For those of you who aren’t familiar with us, Alumni Ventures is a network-powered VC focused on providing accredited investors access to venture. We do this by creating actively managed portfolios for communities and individuals.

  Before we kick things off and get to the fun stuff, I have some notes and disclosures to read. So bear with me. Today we’re speaking about health tech and our views of the associated landscape. This presentation is for informational purposes only and is not an offer to buy or sell securities, which are only made pursuant to the formal offering documents for the fund.

  We encourage you to review important disclosures in the materials provided for the meeting, which you can access via the investor portal. A few quick housekeeping items: you will not be on camera and will be on mute for the entire presentation. This presentation will be recorded. We’ll send a recording as well as a link to the data room where you can access additional information about our Health Tech Fund.

  With that out of the way, let’s move into our agenda and what I expect will be an insightful conversation with Chris and Lacey. This discussion will help define digital health and highlight exciting trends reshaping the digital health market.

  We’ll also have a Q&A session toward the end of the presentation, and we encourage you to submit questions via the chat or question box in your webinar panel. We’ll do our very best to answer all of your questions live, but if we don’t get to them, we’ll follow up with you via email.

  What I’d like to do now is move on to the portion you’re all here for. As I mentioned, I’m a Senior Partner on the community team. I focus on capital raising across all of our funds, making sure Lacey and our investing teams have the capital to deploy and build great portfolios of companies.

  So let me pause there and hand it over to Lacey and Chris to introduce themselves. Then they’ll begin our fireside chat, and I’ll be back toward the end of the presentation to wrap things up after they take some of your questions. Lacey, over to you.

  Speaker 2:
  Great, thanks everyone for being with us and spending the next 45 minutes to an hour of your day. We’re really honored. My name is Lacey Johnson, and I am a Managing Partner here on the investing team at Alumni Ventures, where I run a team of investment professionals sourcing and leading investments across a handful of sectors, including healthcare.

  I joined Alumni Ventures about five years ago and have been involved in over a hundred investments during my time here, including numerous investments in digital health, healthcare services, and biotech. I haven’t been an investor my entire career. Prior to joining AV, I worked for a Boston-based investment office where I focused on private alternatives, including venture capital investments across the globe. I got my start at Goldman Sachs and also spent time at JP Morgan, all in investing roles.

  But enough about me—I’m super excited to introduce Chris Coburn. Chris, I’d love for you to just kick things off and tell our audience a little bit about yourself.

  Speaker 3:
  Thanks, Lacey. As you said, I’m the Chief Innovation Officer at Mass General Brigham. We’re one of the largest healthcare systems in the U.S., principally located in New England.

  By size, we’re the largest academic research enterprise in the country. Our Harvard Medical School faculty conduct about $2.3 billion a year in research. We envision ourselves as the premier system for taking faculty discoveries and bringing them into care, while also using insights from care delivery to drive research now and in the future.

  Personally, I run our innovation team, which is about 130 people. We’re probably the largest academic team doing what we do. We’re essentially the business development arm for the technology and unique competencies of this system.

  I’ve been here for nearly a decade. Before this, I spent more than a decade at Cleveland Clinic and prior to that was with Battelle Memorial Institute. I’ve also done other work on the finance side of science. I come from a big family and am originally from Cleveland, Ohio.

  Speaker 2:
  Great. We’re so lucky to have you with us today. The mandate of your team and the scope of what you deal with day in and day out could fill countless sessions—we could spend the rest of the year talking about all the interesting things you do.

  But today, to avoid “boiling the ocean,” we’re going to focus more on digital health. To kick things off, can you help us define what digital health is? If we were to read about this in the news, we’d find countless definitions, but how do you and your team think about it and the overall opportunity set?

   

  Speaker 3:
  Obviously, it’s a broad classification—in a sense, what isn’t digital health? According to the FDA, it relates to electronic tools that support the development and delivery of care.

  An easier way to describe it might be: digital health is the use of computing platforms, software, connectivity, sensors, and similar technologies designed to improve care delivery, safety, efficiency, and personalization.

  We’ll talk more about it, but essentially, it’s a broad definition. Perhaps we wouldn’t necessarily count word processing as digital health, but it’s pretty close. There isn’t anything in healthcare that hasn’t been improved by the use of software or other electronic tools.

  Speaker 2:
  That’s a great way of putting it. It helps me answer the next question—what isn’t digital health? How does it differ from traditional healthcare? Or is it just a new way of thinking about it? Am I right to say there aren’t really areas that fall outside of digital health?

  Speaker 3:
  That’s a good question—it would take some thought. Returning to the original premise: if you think about the moment when care is delivered, digital health enhances that moment and improves everything that occurs before and after it.

  Leading into that moment, it’s about accessing information and understanding data—whether genomic or population health—and deriving insights from it. Then it’s applying those insights at the individual level for a single patient.

  After that, it’s about continuous learning as you stay with the patient through connected health technologies, population-level data, and other tools.

  Essentially, technologies are improving every phase of care—in ways that were inconceivable as recently as a decade ago.

  Speaker 2:
  That makes me feel better because it does seem like there are digital applications for nearly everything. Some may feel a little niche, but it’s exciting to see technology impacting every aspect of the care spectrum.

  Can we talk a bit about the trends leading to digital health being all over the news and top of mind? For those of us in the industry, it’s been around for a decade or more, but many people are only now starting to notice it in their daily lives. COVID was a tremendous tailwind for applications like telehealth, but more broadly, can you discuss the macro environment making this an interesting time for digital health?

  Speaker 3:
  Well, yeah, let’s be sure to talk about the effect of the pandemic, but it’s important to wind the clock back maybe 15 years—or slightly more—when electronic health records started to become foundational to care delivery, at least in large settings such as academic medical centers or large hospital systems.

  As that infrastructure became firmly established, things started to build off of it and take advantage of it. Working in a large healthcare system at the time that was an early adopter of one of the premier electronic health record systems, we saw four main things occurring:

  First, the creation of data through new sensors—whether at the point of care or through other mechanisms. Then, the aggregation and curation of that data, forming large datasets. For a while, the concept of “big data” dominated healthcare thinking.

  Now, that’s less in the public conversation, but behind the scenes, computational systems and engines have become enormously powerful. It wasn’t just that we had data—we could actually do something with it.

  Finally, the end goal, which is still a work in progress, is integrating that information and those insights into clinical workflows and operational processes.

  That’s been the backdrop for almost a generation. There’s been a broad understanding and plenty of examples of this breaking through.

  Then, enter early 2020—just before the pandemic hits. Healthcare providers were already adapting; we had teams working virtually around the clock. One key focus was deploying digital technologies.

  I recall that in the quarter before COVID hit, we had around 2,000 digitally enabled patient engagements. The month after COVID hit, that number jumped to around 200,000. It was shocking.

  This speaks to your question about what was really going on. In my view, it was an organizational evolution—someone hit the pedal to the floor. Things that previously took months just to assess could now be deployed in a day or two.

  That forced a lot of rapid learning on organizations and individuals. Today, there’s much greater confidence in using these technologies in care settings. While usage has drifted down from the pandemic peak, it’s not going back to pre-pandemic levels. The evolution has shifted from crisis mode to a day-to-day operational reality—and that’s where we are now.

  Speaker 2:
  What about other trends and how they interact with the growth of digital health? For example, value-based care—we’ve been reading about it for years, but it feels like technology, especially in measurement tools, care coordination platforms, and remote patient monitoring, is really enabling this shift.

  Obviously, it takes all parties—payers, providers, and even patients—to make it work. Is technology accelerating the shift to value-based care, and is that driving trends you’re seeing?

  Speaker 3:
  Without question, it is. The rate of adoption is still to be determined, but it’s clear that these technologies can lead to higher-quality, more affordable, and safer care.

  That understanding has crossed a threshold in value-based care. Broad demonstration of these technologies’ benefits is still ongoing—think of this as an environmental validation phase.

  But it’s certainly the future of care delivery at scale. There’s been lots of progress, though challenges remain.

  Speaker 2:
  Definitely. That’s good context—I appreciate that.

  Another trend I’d like your thoughts on is the consumerization of healthcare. We’ve seen many direct-to-consumer companies that people once said would “never move to the enterprise,” yet now large payers and providers are valuing the patient engagement these companies have established.

  What’s your perspective on these businesses and their role in today’s healthcare landscape?

  Speaker 3:
  Your question reflects the marketplace’s evolution. Not long ago, providers were trying to figure out retail-level patient engagement. Now, the biggest consumer-driven companies are increasingly becoming factors in healthcare.

  This raises the overall platform for anyone providing patient-facing services.

  Patients themselves have also become much more sophisticated. The ubiquity of devices like Apple Watches is an example. Who would have imagined, not long ago, that people could monitor heart health parameters daily?

  That level of consumer education reflects broad trends—people have learned to be effective digital consumers (think Netflix), and that experience makes them better healthcare consumers as well.

  Speaker 2:
  That’s definitely fair. Let’s change the conversation slightly and talk about some of the most exciting trends you’re seeing today. Forget the market noise—what’s really getting you and your team most excited?

  Speaker 3:
  Great question. First, in terms of the current care environment, we’re still in what I’d call a crisis category as a society and within the medical community.

  For example, I believe around 40% of patients in our emergency rooms are behavioral health patients waiting for inpatient care. That’s a failure of access—the community lacks the resources to meet those patients’ needs.

  What’s exciting is the emergence of digital technologies in behavioral health and their ability to provide high-level, sophisticated care remotely.

  As we’ve discussed throughout this webinar, that represents a fundamental change in healthcare.

  Speaker 3:
  The flip side, going in a totally different direction, is the societal benefit from mapping the human genome and the enormous breakthroughs in gene therapy and cell therapy—developments rooted in decades of research.

  These advances have come to fruition, though there are still questions and even some recent challenges. Without a doubt, diseases that were once lethal are now being reduced to background conditions or outright cured. That’s unbelievable progress.

  When I was growing up, I remember at least two kids in my grade school class passing away from pediatric blood cancers—conditions that today are completely treatable. We’ve reached a remarkable point, but I believe the slope of innovation is getting even steeper in terms of benefits delivered to the average patient.

  Speaker 2:
  Just a random aside—everyone reads a little about innovation, but in your role, how do you think about getting these innovations into the hands of most people? Obviously, treatments can be expensive. What do you think about that trade-off at Mass General Brigham?

  Speaker 3:
  Access to innovation, whether in the U.S. or globally, is a key question. I was just giving a talk last week in South America, where many were asking about this.

  The breakthroughs we saw during COVID—the rapid development of vaccines and therapies in breathtakingly short timeframes—highlight the issue. How does the work of brilliant scientists and clinicians in places like Boston and Kendall Square become available worldwide?

  Often, access comes through medical products—smart devices addressing diseases in entirely new ways, devices that work continuously, and new therapies.

  I believe the greatest tool and leveler is the mobile phone. I’m not sure of the exact percentage, but I think over 90% of Americans have one. That means an enormous amount of innovative medical technology can immediately reach patients and consumers through that channel.

  Innovation spans all areas of healthcare. In some cases, it reaches patients quickly and sometimes at almost no cost. In others, particularly therapies for ultra-rare diseases, costs are high, but those are often supported by foundations, government programs, and individuals.

  Overall, it’s a mix that reflects the varying categories of innovation.

  Speaker 2:
  That’s great context. Thinking about something you mentioned—within hospital systems, particularly around mental health—this is likely near and dear to many on this call, whether personally or through someone they know.

  Digital health is a great way to reach more people. But lately, larger digital health companies have faced criticism for prescription practices related to certain drug treatments.

  It’s an interesting balance—bringing care to many at scale while maintaining quality. What interesting solutions are you and your team seeing to address the shortage of providers, treatment centers, and available beds for mental health care?

  Speaker 3:
  There are a couple of things wrapped up in that question. First, the digital market’s response to behavioral health:

  There’s still a significant amount of innovation occurring in very small companies. The challenge is moving these companies and their valuable insights and products beyond pilot-level, narrow applications to an enterprise level where they’re broadly available.

  That reflects market churn. In other industries, it’s long been established that once companies reach a certain size, they’re acquired by larger players, which then deliver the technology through established channels. That process is still evolving in digital health generally and behavioral health specifically.

  You also have the added regulatory dimension—providing digital behavioral health therapies means influencing psychiatric well-being through an app.

  There’s a lot to consider: reliance on algorithms built from data sets that aren’t always fully representative, for example. It’s still a work in progress.

  There have been important breakthroughs in digital behavioral health, but we’re early in the process. That said, there are some notable successes despite this early stage.

  Speaker 2:
  Great—that’s helpful. Another topic on many people’s minds is the broader economic and macro environment.

  After the pandemic, a ton of investment flowed into digital health, driving valuations very high. Some argue that because many applications can serve hundreds of millions of patients, they’re appropriately valued.

  Given potential recessionary pressures, what are your thoughts on valuations in the space relative to the broader macro environment?

  Speaker 3:
  Yeah, I’m just one person, so please don’t read too much into my answer. I was recently with some of our digital investment colleagues, and I think many in the community expect the next two years to be complicated, with a lot of downward pressure.

  There’s another, less popular, counter-argument that things may start to come back toward the end of this year. There are massive resources driving investment—particularly given crises like behavioral health. These challenges naturally lead to investment and potentially government action.

  If you’re a market watcher or a big institutional investor, you might believe those trends are powerful enough to overcome the current downward drift. (Maybe “drift” is too friendly a word , but you get the idea.)

  The numbers are stunning. Just looking at one category—the Alzheimer’s challenge—even our own faculty at Mass General Brigham are doing innovative, breakthrough work diagnosing and hopefully addressing neurodegeneration.

  From an investment standpoint, how long can innovation stay relatively suppressed? Valuations are down. I believe the biotech market is down another 30%. But there’s also a large pool of resources that has been raised over the last couple of years and hasn’t yet been deployed.

  Going forward, investment will likely be more selective and at lower valuations. But pharma and biotech companies have accumulated very large war chests, and eventually, their boards and leadership will want to put that capital to work. They may be able to acquire technology or companies at a slightly lower basis than a year ago.

  However, when you’re talking about addressing diseases with trillions of dollars of potential economic impact, it only takes two companies or investors to drive valuations up again.

  I start from a place of great optimism. The kind of work our faculty is doing—much of it not even public yet—is so exciting to think about in terms of its application.

  So, in short: we’re down now, but I don’t think we’ll stay down long relative to these valuations.

  Speaker 2:
  Yeah, I think the key takeaway is that innovation will continue to persist. Being able to invest in innovation via long-lock asset vehicles—like private equity and venture capital—lets you weather downturns and capture the exciting developments still happening.

  The macro trends show the need for these solutions and products is strong, if not accelerating, making it an interesting time.

  Speaker 3:
  And Lacey, just to jump in on that point—something worth noting. When I moved to Boston in 2013 from the Midwest, one of the most surprising things was that the translational gap—without using the overused phrase for it—exists even in Boston.

  It’s not unique to regions outside of Boston or San Francisco. A fortunate development over the last few years is the emergence of more vehicles aimed at that spot in the spectrum.

  For example, firms like Deerfield have raised enormous funds and are deploying resources specifically to bridge that translational gap. Other groups like Flagship are reinventing the model, still focused on advancing early-stage technological insights.

  Academic centers, including ours, are also allocating our own resources. We have a pre-commercial investment fund with about $450 million under management. It looks very much like a traditional venture fund but exclusively focuses on technology developed by our faculty.

  Additionally, we recently launched a pre-commercial award program—not technically an investment—to help accelerate promising faculty technologies more quickly, ideally having greater patient impact by compressing what could otherwise be long timelines.

  When we talk about innovation broadly, the environment isn’t static—it’s highly dynamic. Even in Boston, new approaches have emerged for addressing the translational gap.

  At the federal level, the Biden administration has introduced ARPA-H to mimic the long-recognized success of the military in bridging this gap.

  To me, these developments are very welcome and potentially highly rewarding in terms of patient benefit.

  Speaker 2:
  That’s great context—thank you so much for sharing. Looking at the questions submitted by our audience, both before and during the session, we’ve got some interesting ones.

  The first question is about the potential impact of AI and what you’re seeing in that area.

  Speaker 3:
  Well, it kind of gets back to our digital discussion. Every major category of healthcare is currently benefiting from AI—whether it’s diagnostics, administrative processes, therapeutic applications, or surgery—it’s happening everywhere.

  A great example for me is the work of Dr. Connie Lehman, the head of the Breast Cancer Diagnostic Center at MGH. Her work uses large-scale imaging registries—up to 50,000 x-rays—for two key things.

  First, to diagnose earlier—with less information, they’re able to identify the presence of disease, sometimes based on information not discernible to the human eye or through traditional radiologist interpretation.

  Second, her work is uncovering disease in subsets of patients where it had not previously been as readily identified.

  So, the benefits to the patient community are profound. And in every early diagnostic application, AI is now leading to predictive technologies.

  One of our cardiologists is working on using AI to detect cardiovascular disease up to 10 years earlier than it would otherwise be diagnosed. That predictive capability means you can address it when it’s more manageable—through lifestyle or dietary changes.

  There’s a lot to think about regarding the benefits of AI in healthcare. Robotic process automation, for example, removes back-office expenses.

  We also have a very successful technology helping physicians more accurately code how they classify diseases for the patients they’re treating, which has applications across the industry.

  So yes, as you’d expect, there’s a great deal going on.

  Speaker 2:
  Wow, that’s really helpful. It’s great to see AI not only as a transformative technology but also as simply a better way to do things.

  As you said, it’s impacting everything—sometimes in visible ways, other times it’s more behind the scenes.

  We’re also getting a number of questions about blockchain technology. It’s another buzzy space—would love to hear what you and your team are seeing at the intersection of healthcare and blockchain.

  Speaker 3:
  Yeah. I think you can look back at many cycles—terms like “buzzy” are definitely familiar.

  In the beginning, it’s great to be associated with a new buzzword—there was “med tech,” then “bios,” and so on. Eventually, though, the excitement wears off, and sometimes you’d rather not be associated with the hype. I’m not exactly sure where blockchain stands right now, but I’ll share an example.

  We’re familiar with a company based in Cleveland called Actual. They were recently profiled by the Health Management Academy for their work using blockchain to shrink the time it takes to accredit a clinical provider—a physician or other clinician.

  From the hospital or employer standpoint, accreditation often takes an average of 15 days. That’s 15 days when highly trained professionals can’t actually do their job because they’re not yet authorized to practice in a new geographic location.

  Actual uses powerful computational technology to shrink that timeframe—in some cases, from 12 to 15 days down to just one.

  It may seem like a boring problem, but it’s incredibly high ROI. Healthcare is the way it is, in part, because a fraction of the clinical workforce is sidelined by bureaucratic delays.

  So, a technology that improves access to qualified providers has the potential to improve care delivery and efficiency in a very tangible way.

  Speaker 2:
  That’s a great example—and really helpful to hear. It illustrates the power of blockchain as a better way of doing things, rather than just another “buzzy” trend.

  It may seem boring at first glance, but as you said, it’s a high-ROI, impactful use case.

  Okay, in the interest of time, we have a number of other questions and we’ll be sure to get back to folks one-on-one. But a general theme we’re seeing is:

  What advice do you have for people who are building—or thinking of building—a company and want to sell into Mass General?

  I know your focus is on cultivating talent and innovation from within, but I suspect you have a good perspective on the broader ecosystem. Curious if you have any thoughts to share with the group.

  Speaker 3:
  Yeah. First of all, just circling back to your last question—don’t expect us to be taking payment through crypto anytime soon. Let’s get that out there.

  That said, I won’t comment on my current or prior employer specifically, but speaking more broadly about academic medical systems:

  The beautiful thing about these institutions is that they reflect the best of academia—thousands of years of higher education organized in a way that benefits patients.

  But from a company’s perspective, trying to interface with one of these large organizations, it can be complex. There are still a lot of different—and sometimes divergent—pathways into a multibillion-dollar health system.

  Speaker 3:
  And I think that can make it hard for a small company—because finding out how the decision is actually made, who makes the decision, and what the timeline should be, can be challenging.

  We are very committed to making ourselves a better partner, but we still have work to do. Being more responsive, getting to a “no” more quickly—if we’re not going to work with someone, let’s let them know. Let’s not have them blow a lot of cycles.

  In many communities, if you’re trying to sell into what we might call “big healthcare,” the advice on the street is: plan on it taking at least a year.

  Part of that is just how long it takes the organization to move, but it’s also because it’s hard for these organizations to make decisions on a limited amount of information.

  So the more time that goes by, the more information is acquired—about the segment, or the individual vendor. All of that factors in.

  But I would say we are committed to being a better partner as a system. Still, we have lots to learn from things that were not optimal in the past.

  Speaker 2:
  I mean, that’s awesome context. I think sometimes folks get lulled into the idea that it might be a quick sale. I think just preparing for the longer-term sale and doing everything that needs to happen is the right mindset.

  Speaker 3:
  And Lacey, maybe I’d just add—
  I see there are about a hundred folks online. If you’re thinking about it, maybe start by working with a smaller organization—even a community hospital—where you might be able to generate data more quickly.

  Having that reference point when you come into a large medical center like ours can accelerate things.

  I think it also provides a common framework to discuss the issues and the opportunity.

  We have a digital fund for investing in things like this, and one of the fund’s roles is to help with front-end diligence—to make these engagements more fruitful for both sides.

  Speaker 2:
  That’s awesome. And thanks for shedding a little light on the broader industry. I think many of our participants here really appreciate that.

  Well, Chris, I think this was amazing. Any opportunity to hear about what you’re working on and thinking about is an awesome way to spend any amount of time.

  As mentioned in the beginning, we could’ve gone down a thousand different rabbit holes about all the interesting and cool things within your mandate, but we had to pick one.

  I’m happy we got to learn more about digital health. Thank you so much.

  Speaker 3:
  Great. Thank you. It’s terrific to be with you—happy to follow up with anyone in the audience when it works.

  Speaker 1:
  I’d like to echo that as well, Chris—and hello again, everyone.

  For this webinar, I had the benefit of being a fly on the wall, and I honestly feel like I had the best seat in the house.

  Chris, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights. Lacey, as always, incredible perspective—thank you for co-hosting.

  I thought it was a really insightful look into the world of health tech and how certain innovations are impacting our lives going forward.

  I took a lot away from it, and I’m sure our audience did as well.

  That brings us to the close of our call. I wish we had more time. Looking at the live feed, I know there are several questions we weren’t able to address, but we’ll be following up with you directly via email to make sure you get those answers.

  And for those of you who are interested in our Health Tech Fund, which is closing at the end of June, we encourage you to reach out.

  Please don’t hesitate to book a call with me or one of my senior partner colleagues if you’d like to further discuss health tech or any of our funds.

  As a final reminder, we’ll be sending out a recording of this webinar, along with a link to get started with the investment process.

  We have more information on the screen now in case you’d like to explore materials or email us directly.

  With that, I’ll sign off and say a final thank you for joining today’s webinar.

  Take care, everyone.