Collision Conference: Encouraging Signs for Healthcare

June 29, 2022
Colin Hung
5 Min Read

Collision #CollisionConf, one of the world’s largest tech conferences, wrapped up last week in Toronto, Canada. Based on the comments from the healthcare keynotes and from the digital health + medtech entrepreneurs roaming the aisles of the exhibit hall – there are encouraging signs that healthcare may weather the economic downturn better than other industries. Why? Because healthcare organizations still need technology to deal with the staffing crisis while still meeting the goals of reducing costs.

Technology + Physician Retention

Dr. Katharine Smart is the President of the Canadian Medical Association and a pediatrician in Whitehorse, Yukon, one of the more remote northern provinces in Canada. She sat down for a conversation with Healthcare IT Today about the role technology can play in helping to retain physicians and reduce clinical cognitive load.

[Note: Humblest apologies to Dr. Smart for typing her name wrong in the video and for not tagging her properly @KatharineSmart]

Dr. Smart stressed how important it is for technology vendors to partner with physicians and nurses to better design their solutions. That partnership was, for the most part, missing for the past decade and we ended up with systems that are frustrating to use, increasing the cognitive load on clinicians, and contributing to their exodus.

Look for the full interview with Dr. Smart in the weeks ahead.

Technology + Primary Care

It was a pleasant surprise to speak with Philippe Marcotte, CEO at Lotus Medical. Marcotte and the team at Lotus are bringing a Direct Primary Care approach to Canada – creating primary care practices that emphasize patient AND physician experience. The only difference is that Lotus continues to bill the provincial single-payer and not patients directly.

Lotus built their own “OS” which is the backbone for all the technology deployed in their practice and takes a patient from A to Z. Here is a clip from our interview.

The Decline of Telehealth?

Over the past few months, there has been a lot of data showing that the usage of telehealth is declining. As the pandemic wanes, more physicians and hospital services are moving back to in-person visits. Accelerating this trend is the potential end to the reimbursement of telehealth visits at the same rate as in-person.

At Collision, I had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Brett Belchetz, Co-Founder & CEO of Maple, one of Canada’s largest providers of virtual care. I asked him for his thoughts on the decline of telehealth and whether that spells trouble for virtual care providers.

Digital Transformation Must Align with Quadruple Aim

Dr. Jan Kimpen, Chief Medical Officer at Philips was excited to talk about the digital transformation in healthcare and how we must keep those transformation efforts aligned to the quadruple aim. He emphasized how companies need to put much more focus on the physician/caregiver experience AND reducing costs.

Simple Solutions that Work

There is a myth that the only way to succeed as a startup is to offer something new and novel to a target market. That certainly is one path for success. Another is to build a simple solution that works well, then out-hustle competitors to land customers and ensure they love your product.

That’s what Alaffia Health is doing. They make an AI solution that helps ensure the integrity of claims (ie: they find errors, optimize payments, and flag potential fraud). They have landed early customers, worked hard to ensure those customers are happy, and are now looking to expand.

It was fun to speak with their team and hear the passion they have for this space.

Encouraging Signs at Collision

Having the opportunity to attend Collision in Toronto was special. It was the first in-person conference in my home city since the start of the pandemic. I came away from the event very encouraged.

Not only were there many interesting digital health and medtech companies with innovative and helpful solutions, there were also many investors roaming the aisles looking for promising companies. To me that shows that despite the potential downturn in the economy, there are still opportunities in the healthcare market.

Hopefully we will see that play out in the months ahead.

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Colin Hung

Colin Hung is the co-founder of the #hcldr (healthcare leadership) tweetchat one of the most popular and active healthcare social media communities on Twitter. Colin speaks, tweets and blogs regularly about healthcare, technology, marketing and leadership. He is currently an independent marketing consultant working with leading healthIT companies. Colin is a member of #TheWalkingGallery. His Twitter handle is: @Colin_Hung.

   

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