Five Expert Insights from the HealthXL Community

By HealthXL Team & Community 

Over the past month, our HealthXL community members discussed the recent drop in digital health investments, patient engagement in digital health and outcome measures in oncology digital health interventions among other topics. We’ve put together a snapshot of expert insights from these meetings.

#1 On building trust with potential pharma partners: Some pharma companies are not ready for digital health business models and they can force digital projects into their existing workstream, which creates a deviation from the main goal. Instead of fitting the digital product in the box of pharma, the focus should be on how to link both products. Both parties must be clear on what they want to achieve in the short and long term; sometimes partnerships fail because there is no alignment on the long-term goals. Continuous dialogue, proactive conversation, transparency, and the ability to solve problems are key elements for successful partnerships. 

#2 On the importance of patient engagement: Patient engagement is key to the success of digital health solutions. For instance, digital health solutions can remind patients to take their medications but some patients need to be convinced of their benefits first.The whole experience of using a digital solution must be engaging to improve health. Stakeholders (e.g pharma, payers, physicians) struggle to understand what good engagement with DTx looks like and how that may vary over the course of the patient journey. Understanding the engagement requirements of the different stakeholders can help DTx companies build a tailored value proposition for each of them.

#3 On the recent dip in investments: Apart from the current economic situation, this sharp drop in DTx investments may also be due to the difficulty that digital health companies have in proving their value and the positive outcomes of their solution. Additionally, adoption by physicians is also a challenging issue which many companies face in convincing doctors to prescribe DTx. Supporting HCPs with the right vocabulary to explain the DTx treatment and showing the clinical outcomes, can help them better provide this option to a patient which in turn can help demonstrate the value of these solutions to investors. 

#4 On combined label claims for drug and DTx combos: From a regulatory perspective, to be considered a combination DTx+drug product, the combination must do something different that cannot be done by the two parts independently. Then, the clinical claims need to align with the study endpoints and explain how they both act together. However, pharma companies are risk averse and are not willing to run trials with a DTx combination. There is a lack of commercial incentive for Pharma to willingly run drug+DTx trials. It may be better to build those combinations with drugs who have a patent expiry coming up to help differentiate them and show their value from other players in the market. Another possibility is for generic drugs to use DTx to build combinations that differentiate them from other generic competitors.

#5 On outcome measures in oncology digital health solutions: Outcomes can be broadly classified as either medical, which includes clinical outcomes like overall survival  and progression free survival, and quality of life for patients or financial, which includes savings for the provider, savings for payers, and revenue for pharma. The outcome measures of importance in oncology will depend on the type and stage of the disease as well as the treatment administered. Additionally, the outcome measured will really depend on who the audience for the data will be i.e. pharma vs payors. 

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