Digital Orthopaedics Conference (DOCSF)

In this episode, Kyle Rose, Managing Director of Medical Technology, and Richard Close, Managing Director of Digital & Tech-Enabled Health Equity Research represent the Canaccord Genuity investment bank and give their perspective on the 2022’s MSK investment data pulled from Silicon Valley Bank’s annual report for Healthcare Investments and Exits. Richard Close is Cannacord’s Managing Director of Digital and Tech-Enabled Health Equity Research and offers his point of view from what he’s seen from digital companies. Kyle Rose is the Managing Director of Medical Technologies and focuses more on the medical devices side of the investments shown.

Regarding investments, mergers, and acquisitions, digital health companies consolidated deals similar to what they did in 2020. This time, they focused on reducing care costs for employers and payers while striving for better patient outcomes. This cost-avoidance investment strategy is becoming strong, but it doesn’t rule out value-based agreements yet. When it comes to devices, however, there was a trend that leaned towards procedural-specific technologies, which help providers excel in their technique and produce better results. It was worth it for Kyle to note that this can be reflected in the data that shows more investment in enabling technologies for procedures, pre-surgical planning, and implants.

Richard and Kyle comment on the role AI played in investments in 2022. Based on their experiences, AI-enabled technologies find themselves on the rise when they simplify user experience and satisfaction, key factors around reimbursement. They find value in these propositions when it enhances surgical techniques and procedures, resource allocation and optimization, and workflow dynamics. They don’t believe there is yet true regulatory risk when it comes to investing in these technologies, from an orthopedic perspective at least. However, they do believe there are future uses, similar to the diabetes field, where AI could be used to solve orthopedics and staffing issues.

Tune in to this episode and listen to Kyle Rose and Richard Close give their investment-bank-permeated take on 2022’s MSK investments!

Welcome to DOCSF Venture 2023! 

In this episode, Dr. Doctor Nancy Lynch, Founder, and President of Advisorthopædics and DOCSF Venture Director presents a detailed analysis of the trends in 2022’s MSK investments with data from Silicon Valley Bank’s annual report for Healthcare Investments and Exits. As explained by Dr. Lynch, the data shows that 2022 didn’t match 2021’s unprecedented peaks, but the overall trajectory for health tech investments is still upward. To swiftly deliver her points, Dr. Lynch focuses only on any-size equity investments in private companies that have an application to facilitate MSK care.

In 2022, 7% of the venture investments were in MSK, with mid-sized deals gaining more traction. Interestingly enough, 80% of the investment made over the last five years in ortho-MSK went to ortho-facilitated ancillary technologies and focused ortho-spine technologies. Data showed that most funded digital technologies aren’t directly applicable to operative procedures or their preparation. On the other hand, three-quarters of the non-digital health MSK investments are technologies that can be applied in the operating room directly. 

With the data presented, Dr. Lynch points out some takeaways, like more than half of the investments being AI-enabling approaches to digital MSK care. She also notices an increasing trend in technology related to surgery performance. Additionally, Hinge Health stood out amongst the compilation of investment data by making megadeals and financing substantially in patient engagement platforms. 

Listen to Dr. Nancy Lynch break down what she believes are transformational investments in the MSK field!

Digital transformation not only regards technology; it's about the intersection of technology with people and processes. In this episode, Paul Limbrey, Managing Director for Global Agencies and Partners at Google, talks about digital transformation and key things he's learned about the successful implementation of new technology in any system. He breaks down four good things that result when landing a digital transformation effort inside a large organization.

The first step he mentions is having a change strategy for the transformation in mind. Think of everything that could go wrong, processes related to data and information flows, policy implications, and your human capital capabilities. The next one is having a visible and active executive sponsor. He talks about identifying agents of change within the organization who might have in them to drive the transformation forward and then looking for someone who might have genuine power to back them up, as the number one reason why projects fail in corporations is the lack of one.

The next step is building coalitions, for which Paul encourages everyone to engage with the middle managers. It’s essential to find support in the people that are data-driven and want to understand why transformation is good instead of those who are experience-driven and are comfortable with the status quo. The final step is having a plan for the end state. Here, he discusses pilots and how they can be a double-edged sword as many companies get stuck in developing many pilots but never implementing successful ones. This is why there must be a plan to ensure that successful pilots are scaled up and move to the standard business servicing teams, putting innovation into action.

Many great ideas can drive innovation. Listen to this episode to learn from Paul how to do tech integration to face those challenges companies face with adoption for digital transformation!

In this episode, Katya Hancock, partner, and director of StartUp Health Network at StartUp Health introduces two of their companies and what they're doing in healthcare. She also shares their moonshots: big health challenges of our time. Victor Wang, CEO of care.coach talks about how his company is solving the caregiver crisis with pet avatars. Nicolas Rosencovich, CEO and co-founder of MindCo Health, speaks about how his company uses VR technology as a new approach to behavioral and mental health treatments.

Care.Coach combines knowledge from a global team of humans with artificial intelligence in a talking cat or dog avatar that has conversational intelligence making it fun, lighthearted, non-judgmental, compassionate, and empathetic. Its goal is to coach people, primarily seniors discharged from a medical facility, to take better care of themselves. They have reduced the need for nursing home visits, trips to the ER and acute care centers, and loneliness. These pet avatars are currently offered through health plans and will improve members’ self-care experiences.

MindCo Health uses virtual reality to immerse the brain and body of individuals in situations that will trigger different sensations and emotions so that they can consciously train and change their behavior. They have used this technology for smoking cessation, stress management, burnout, and preventative treatments. With the help of VR, they recreate scenarios that trigger sensations of guilt, frustration, and other emotions related to the target behavior. These also combine exposure therapy with mindfulness interventions to create awareness and change the automatic pilot mode through breathing exercises. Mind Co Health alleviates the cost of behavioral health therapy as this approach is delivered at home and eliminates the need for appointments.

Listen to the conversation Victor and Nicholas have with Katya about their startups. Learn why they are part of StartUp health as they aim to make big changes in healthcare with care.coach and MindCo Health!

In this episode, Louis Rosenberg, CEO of Unanimous AI, illustrates what it means to live in a world of complete virtual and augmented reality: the metaverse. Louis has been working in this field since the late eighties, but technology has only caught up recently to make VR and AR widely accessible and not just something used for education purposes in the healthcare industry.

With the rise of the Internet, interest in virtual reality dropped around the late nineties after a decade of being latent. The medical industry kept it alive with training simulators for doctors, as they were in demand and development. The smartphone, particularly the iPhone, was the catalyst for change that brought down the costs of processors, sensors, and flat panel screens, all of which allowed for VR headsets to be more accessible. With these devices and technology up-to-par, conversations and advancements around the concept of the metaverse skyrocketed, and Louis believes that just as the smartphone did, the metaverse will be weaved into our lives within the next ten years.

He talks about two metaverses: the virtual reality world and the augmented reality world. The former consists of a world purely used for entertainment, the way we currently use television, while the latter is one where, by using lightweight glasses, information will be brought up from the virtual world interposed in our physical one. We live in a society where information is very valuable, so much so that humans are willing to trade their own data for access to more information. Louis is pushing for regulations in the upcoming augmented metaverse to avoid third-party entities to take advantage of it the way marketing has been through targeted ads.

Listen to this episode to learn about Louis’s journey with virtual and augmented reality and how he’s taking a different approach with Unanimous AI to augment human abilities within the metaverse instead of replacing them with AI!

In this episode, Shafi Ahmed, Chief Medical Officer, and surgeon at the Royal London Hospital for the NHS, presents what has been the arrival of the metaverse to the healthcare industry. 

Thanks to 5G and Virtual Reality technology, there are many possibilities and opportunities for healthcare that are starting to pop up. We might be looking at the dawn of a brand new hospital experience within the metaverse. We’re now entering a Web 3.0 era, converging the digital and physical worlds seamlessly. 

Blockchain technology, NFTs, machine learning, and AI will bring forward new ways to share data securely, opening a lot of doors for many industries. Shafi explains why more connectivity is needed to allow something closer to the Internet of Things in the hospital and how the metaverse presents an interesting alternative. 

It all starts by creating another version of yourself, to create an avatar for you to enter the space with ML, AI, voice technology, and photogrammetry. Shafi believes this will enable virtual education to be more immersive and global than ever before, especially for healthcare training.

He presents Aimedis’s healthcare city in the metaverse as a place where doctors, hospitals, and caregivers can get in touch with patients worldwide and offer them services and support. The plan is for it to be as easy as turning on a smartphone and entering your metaverse property, where you can connect to a healthcare professional in another corner of the world. Shafi discusses how data will be key in defining what that metaverse looks like, as it allows users to share their data better and even monetize it at Aimedis’s Data Exchange Marketplace. 

Listen to this episode to learn from professor Shafi Ahmad how the metaverse and the healthcare industry are inevitably meshing together in many different fields for the better!

In this episode, Alex Flores, Head of Global Health Solutions Vertical, Health, and Life Sciences Organization at Intel Corporation, talks about how the company partners and develops technology to solve some of the industry's most challenging problems. He speaks about what he considers the four technology superpowers and the tech-driven transformation they bring to healthcare.

Alex starts by retelling his last doctor’s visit with his primary care doctor, where he identified four problems during the process: the use of analog practices, siloed data, obstructed workflow efficiencies, and a far-from-perfect patient experience. These issues could be solved with existing technologies. Healthcare should move from a day-to-day care model to one where experimentation, education, and projection give patients a better understanding of their health and what they can do about it.

He introduces the four technology superpowers that enable digital transformation across multiple industries. AI can allow clinicians to focus on their most challenging problems, pervasive connectivity can help clinicians engage anytime and anywhere, and both edge computing and cloud-to-edge infrastructure enable data to be generated, transported, analyzed, and stored. He also talks about Care Syntax’s digital surgery platform that delivers predictive insights in the OR, called Proximie, allowing clinicians to connect live from anywhere in the world, and Magic Leap’s surgical goggles that immerse surgeons digitally to prepare for complex surgeries.

Listen to Alex Flores’s talk on why digital transformation is a shift the industry needs to embrace and the four technology superpowers that will enable it!

In this episode, Fabrizio Billi, Scientific Director at DOCSF, and Lee Grossman, CEO at OREF, moderate a discussion around six papers on sensors, extended reality, virtual reality, and augmented reality in orthopedics. 

In the module about sensors, they welcomed Jeffrey Lotz, Vice Chair of Research in Orthopedic Surgery at UCSF, and Cory Calendine, an orthopedic surgeon, where they review three papers on electronics being used as diagnostic and therapeutic tools, stretchable and suitable fiber sensors for wireless monitoring of connective tissue strains, and sensor-embedded fracture plates to quantify fracture healing. For them, this technology has still a long way to come but will be passively delivering data insights effectively.

During the second module, discussing the papers about XR, VR, and AR, Fabrizio and Lee are joined by Sigurd Berven, Chief of Spine Service at UCLA, and Louis Rosenberg, CEO at Unanimous AI. The four of them also discuss three papers about trauma patient care simulation that uses extended reality technology in a hybrid emergency room, clinical accuracy through augmented reality, and orthopedic navigation by an AR platform. Even though this seems to be where this XR/VR/AR technology is heading, they all agree that the accuracy is compromised sometimes, and there is space for improvement.

Listen to this episode for two very interesting modules on how sensors, extended, virtual, and augmented reality are being developed to assist orthopedic patients and doctors!

In this episode, Ivan Poupyrev, Director of Google ATAP, Advanced Technologies and Products Division, Nicholas Gillian, lead machine learning engineer at Google Atap, and Stefano Bini, professor of orthopedic surgery at UCSF, talk about a project they are working on together where they use sensors to improve the ability to collect data from patients. This project seeks to explore modern techniques for artificial intelligence in computing to help with the problems of postoperative recovery after orthopedic surgery. 

Ivan Poupyrev starts by talking about the next generation of computing, where the physical world is enhanced by this constantly. He explains how the project uses sensors to scan objects of interest, measure them, and convert this information into data. This type of technology is applied to build digital twins for healthcare. He details how data collection with sensors creates an accurate representation from which you can gather valuable insights for the consumer, be it the patient, the provider, or a payer. Thanks to modern AI advances, it's now possible to integrate as many desired sensors and create clouds without the need for a computer connection.

Nicholas Gillian presents the Google Jacquard tag, which contains an inertial sensor, a small microcontroller, flash memory, and Bluetooth that can directly stream data to the cloud. Using many of these together, the goal of that project is to see and demonstrate that low-cost, non-invasive consumer-grade hardware, Combined with the best of Google's AI and software, can be used to understand and replicate patient outcomes by using motion capture to register and analyze knee angular velocity, total support movement, and hip flexion, among other variables that can help surgeons monitor patients after surgery.

Listen to this conversation about how computation takes data collection into the cloud and visual representation for better insights and outcomes. And also, learn how wearable sensors derive more accurate outcome measures!

In this episode, John Bass, founder, and CEO of Hashed Health talks about the future of payments in healthcare systems using Web3 technologies.

Payments are currently a complicated, costly, and inefficient part of healthcare. The health systems and processes in place were designed for a time that has now passed. Many are migrating from the traditional fee-for-service payment models to value-based and risk-based systems. However, there are still challenges to address in these new models as there is a need for more interoperability, automation, and healthcare trust; This is where John believes Web3 technologies can shift the dynamics between commerce and care, taking payments into the future.

Web3 is a new version of the Internet that we all know, organized around individuals rather than being organized around centralized companies with platforms that are owned and governed by a network of curators and artists or individuals who are responsible for the creation and the delivery of value. Here we find commonly used but widely misunderstood terms like the metaverse, cryptocurrencies, DAOs, and NFTs. John uses an example where total knee replacements are sold as NFTs by a group of orthopedic surgeons with a fixed selling price and terms and conditions of purchase. He details the value transfer and explains the benefits of these types of transactions. 

Tune in and hear John talk about innovation in payments and Web3 technologies that enable it!