MDisrupt’s CEO: Lessons from our 2nd Year & Trends for 2022

MDisrupt’s CEO: Lessons from our 2nd Year & Trends for 2022

by | Aug 20, 2021

ruby.gadelrab

MDisrupt is celebrating its second anniversary this week, and we’re speaking with the company’s founder and CEO, Ruby Gadelrab, about what she’s learned and where digital health is headed.

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Solving the three pain points

MDisrupt: First, tell us about your path to founding MDisrupt.

Ruby Gadelrab: I spent 24 years in healthcare on the commercial side and eventually landed at 23andMe, as VP of commercial marketing. In three years there I really caught the bug for consumerized healthcare and digital health. I left 23andMe to help the growing number of digital health companies that were forming, and consulted for twenty-five of these companies back to back. I learned that these companies, as they bring their products to market, all have the same three pain points.

We built MDisrupt to help them overcome those pain points, which are:

  • How can digital health innovators access trusted health care operators who can help them build and commercialize their products?
  • As soon as a health product gets to market, how does a digital health company find its earliest clinical users? Who are those innovators within the healthcare system that are willing to try products early on?
  • How to quickly generate evidence to convince the variety of stakeholders that need to be convinced?

Our mission is to help the most impactful digital health products get to market quickly and responsibly.

Today, as we embark on our third year, I want to say a huge thank you to everybody who’s been involved in MDisrupt. We’ve built a network of over 200 health industry experts on demand. We’ve worked with over 40 clients already. And we have this network of incredible advisors who have been guiding us every step of the way. I could not be more grateful to the experts in our network, the clients who have trusted us with complex challenges, and the advisors who have guided us every step of the way.

MDisrupt: What are some lessons you’ve learned in growing MDisrupt through its second year?  

Ruby Gadelrab: The top lesson is around trust. A few weeks ago, I interviewed Dr. Shantanu Nundy on Clubhouse and he said, “Healthcare moves at the speed of trust.” It’s all about trust with your clients, your community, your team, and your advisors.

Secondly, you have to build a team that shares your mission and can fill in your knowledge gaps. We’ve built a really incredible team to augment what I know and push the company forward.

The third lesson is the complexities of fundraising, which we started in the last couple of months. We’ve had some amazing interest so far, but fundraising is hard—and it’s really hard as a brown, female, first-time founder. But I’m really optimistic, because we’ve had some great traction and we see ourselves as building a scalable platform that can really help digital health companies accelerate their path to market.

Healthcare innovation is not optional—it’s an absolute necessity. 

MDisrupt: What have you learned from MDisrupt’s health experts that has surprised you?

Ruby Gadelrab: I’ve been marketing and selling to scientists and physicians my whole career. Today, we are at an inflection point. Everybody I speak to is united in saying that innovation in healthcare is not an option anymore. It’s an absolute necessity.

There is a lot of focus on finding solutions around access to health care, improved health outcomes, simplified delivery of services, transparency, and convenience. And one of the challenges is, How do we build these solutions in an evidence-based way?

The incentives for each type of stakeholder are very different. For providers, it’s about maximizing their time, creating solutions that fit into their clinical workflows, and improving their patients’ experience. For payers, it’s about the economics. For patients, it’s about how to access healthcare simply, conveniently, and transparently. And for the digital health companies, it’s about scaling quickly and being the first disrupters in a very complex market.

The big challenge is, How do we create solutions that address the incentives for everybody in that ecosystem? How do we do it cost effectively, responsibly, and in a way that scales? These are the challenges I think we’ll see solved over the next 10 years.

A new breed of clinician

MDisrupt: What are some characteristics of the people who have joined MDisrupt this year? 

Ruby Gadelrab: A lot of the experts who have joined us have experience in building health products. That’s one of the key features of the MDisrupt health expert network—it’s made up of people who have done this before and really understand the challenges.

We’re also seeing a new breed of clinician. These clinicians have been in practice for many years, and see the need for change through innovation. They want to get involved with digital health companies, they want to be medical advisors, and they want to have a say in building products and in how the products are presented to their peers.

These physicians hold the power to change the healthcare system from within. I want to help them understand their power, so they can work with digital health companies so we can get those solutions into healthcare faster.

Secrets of digital health success

MDisrupt: When you look at successful digital health companies, what are they doing right? 

Ruby Gadelrab: First, they engage clinical experts early and often throughout the process of developing a health product.

Second, they take their regulatory and evidence generation very seriously. They don’t skip steps, and they go very deeply into figuring out the appropriate regulatory path and generating the right evidence to convince the various stakeholders.

Third, they build balanced teams. Building health products requires careful orchestration between technical, commercial, and clinical teams, and I think some of the best companies we’ve seen have got a great balance between those three areas.

MDisrupt: In our webinar next week, we’re talking about why it can be important, early on, for a digital health company to hire a chief medical or scientific officer. What’s your view on that? 

Ruby Gadelrab: It’s really important. It helps you build the right product from the start, and save a ton of time and money by not making mistakes. For example, we see a lot of companies who have a technology, and they’re trying to back it into a problem—but it doesn’t actually solve a clinical problem. So having people who really understand clinical workflows and what physicians are looking for can add huge value.

Physicians are some of the most skeptical audiences in the world, but they listen to their peers. And I think chief medical officers, chief scientific officers, and medical affairs teams are really the key to communicating with those communities. Even if it’s a part-time role, chief medical officers are worth their weight in gold and can be the difference between success and failure in getting a health product adopted.

The need for standards

MDisrupt: What are some of the biggest challenges you see in the digital health industry as a whole?

Ruby Gadelrab: There was an article out recently from IQVIA that said there are 350,000 digital health apps in the market, and 250 new ones come out every day. How do we, as consumers or providers, know what’s good? There is no systematized way of identifying what the standards are. If you have a choice of five different genetic tests, which one is right for you? So I think there need to be some standards and transparency around the standards. And I think it’s really important that we bring some of the clinicians along with us in that journey around how that data is generated, how they use it in their clinics.

One thing we would like to do over time is to develop the standards for digital health—to organize the world’s digital health products by performance and create transparency, so people can make the right decisions.

The final challenge is around the cost and time it takes to commercialize a health product. In the consumer world, we can build and commercialize and scale a product within five years. In healthcare, it’s different—the evidence generation by itself takes longer, and the amount of time and the cost in convincing the stakeholders to get widespread adoption is much longer. I think it’s important for innovators to be realistic about what it takes to scale a health product.

Looking ahead

MDisrupt: What do you think is in store for digital health in 2022?

Ruby Gadelrab: I wish I wasn’t saying more COVID solutions, but it will be more COVID solutions because we’re not nearly out of the pandemic yet. With the delta variant, there are going to be more options for testing. I hope over the next year or so, we’ll be thinking about some of the back-to-work solutions for COVID. And I see more healthcare from home solutions, whether that be at-home testing, remote patient monitoring, telemedicine. Many chronic conditions are a function of lifestyle and social determinants of health, so I see a lot of solutions coming around mental health, cancer, cardiovascular disease, addiction, and diabetes.

MDisrupt: This time next year, what do you think we’ll be saying about MDisrupt?

Ruby Gadelrab: I think we will have built out our community of experts to be even bigger and broader. We will have served more truth-seeking clients who are bringing game-changing innovations to healthcare. I think we will have raised our first institutional funding and we’ll hopefully be celebrating with our investors at that point. And I think we will have some new solutions for our digital health clients around how they find their earliest clinical adopters and how they generate evidence. I hope we’ll be celebrating all of that!

At MDisrupt we believe that the most impactful health products should make it to market quickly. We help make this happen by connecting digital health innovators to the healthcare industry experts and scientists they need to responsibly accelerate product development, commercialization, adoption, and scale.

Our expert consultants span the healthcare continuum and can assist with all stages of health product development. This includes regulatory, clinical studies and evidence generation, payor strategies, commercialization, and channel strategies. If you are building a health product, talk to us.

Making the Patient Experience Better

Making the Patient Experience Better

by | Jul 16, 2021

Jennifer Swoyer, DO

Meet Jennifer Swoyer, DO, who leads the family medicine residency program at AMITA Health Adventist Medical Center in La Grange, Illinois.

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Dr. Swoyer is a family physician who has been in practice for over 20 years. Her passion lies in teaching and clinical medicine, helping underserved populations, and improving access to health and wellness programs.

Health consumers driving change

MDisrupt: How is the traditional family practice evolving to meet the demands of health consumers?  

Jennifer Swoyer: Family medicine is evolving quickly, as are most aspects of medicine. For primary care providers, the pandemic shed new light on how we need to integrate technology to improve the quality of care for our patients.

For example, telehealth has been around for a while, but with the pandemic, there were changes that allowed us to be able to integrate it better. The beauty of telehealth is that we were able to screen patients differently, do follow up visits more easily, and stop limiting patients to the schedules that we set. We were able to be much more flexible in making sure that patients got the care that they need and deserve—and this is here to stay.

Technology to engage patients and improve health

MDisrupt: It’s been estimated that there are somewhere between 200K to 400K avoidable, preventable deaths each year in the US. How can physicians partner with health innovators to improve those stats?

Jennifer Swoyer: For medical professionals, preventing deaths is always our goal. Technology, depending on how it’s utilized, can really become a team approach between the provider and patient. The best thing about point-of-care technology is that the individual who has the disease or condition being monitored now has a daily opportunity to understand their own health. That allows me to do a better job as a provider and it becomes more of an opportunity for us to prevent bad outcomes. There are many examples of where we can use these technologies to help this partnership work better.

When we talk about population health and social determinants of health, we’ve seen the healthcare landscape change over the last few years. Healthcare systems have consolidated services to try and create one-stop shopping experiences: If you need to go see your provider, you can also get your X-ray and your labs, everything done in one location. This is really great and improves convenience. When health systems moved to single locations, however, they removed a lot of the providers that were in the community and consolidated them, reducing some of the access. Having mobile clinics that go out to shelters or large church organizations is an amazing outreach opportunity where you can reach a large population and then connect them with technology.

A call to action

MDisrupt: Many in the MDisrupt audience are entrepreneurs who have access to capital, technology, and engineers to build solutions. How can we help?

Jennifer Swoyer: Digital innovators are focusing on important problems that we need to solve, but to truly solve problems requires the right input. Providers in an urban setting, for example, may bring up a very different set of needs than providers in a rural setting. Engaging entrepreneurs and digital thinkers to incorporate views from many types of providers will help align how technology is utilized and ultimately change the trajectory of patient care.

What physicians need from digital health  

MDisrupt: As a provider, what do you see as the most important components of a digital health product?

Jennifer Swoyer: I look at digital health products through two different lenses: patient-forward technology and physician-centered technology. In terms of patient-forward, I look for technology that is usable by the patient and builds ownership and accountability, which will then help me, as the provider, help them manage their health differently. If the technology is physician-centered then it really needs to be technology that is going to help physicians do their jobs better by improving patient outcomes, more easily meeting quality measures, and saving time. Ideal solutions will improve patient satisfaction and physician well-being.

Meeting patients where they are

MDisrupt: Is there something you’ve changed your opinion on since you started practicing medicine?

Jennifer Swoyer: There can be numerous factors that contribute to individuals being successful in managing their genetic predisposition and lifestyle-created conditions. I’ve realized that my job is to work with someone where they are to get the best results and not necessarily focus on all the things that they need to do. For example, when we talk about obesity or diabetes, we focus on the type of diet and exercise you need. Those are things I will continue to talk about, but you have to look at where someone is in their life and what they are facing on a daily basis. If your meal supply is supplemented by a food pantry, you no longer have the same control over the foods you eat. We need to make sure the solutions we are providing and the advice that we are giving work with the individual’s social needs. This is the piece where I have changed the most. I ask questions very differently. I try to work with people where they are and help them get to where they should be.

Bringing healthcare home

MDisrupt: How will traditional health systems do things differently to adapt to a new model of healthcare?

Jennifer Swoyer: We’re all connected all the time now. Continuing to utilize the tools that almost everyone has—a cell phone, an iPad, a laptop—is part of where we need to start. The healthcare landscape is going to continue to change, and it should. Hospitals will be for the sickest patients and people who are less sick will—I hope—no longer be hospitalized and instead will be home-monitored remotely through digital tools.

Providers who are not in an acute setting like the emergency room, but who are part of a primary care practice, will be linked into how the followup gets done and will have access to daily technology for that individual.

As a family medicine physician, I still see patients in the hospital. Patients will ask me,”How long am I going to continue to feel tired?” I always give my math, which is not scientific but is founded on my experience: Every day you spend in the hospital is a week of recovery. We could do better by recuperating at home in our own beds if we could be monitored.

Advice for innovators

MDisrupt: What advice would you give a founder who wants to create tools for better health and wellness?  

Jennifer Swoyer: Most physicians go into medicine because we love what we do. It’s an art and a passion. I want to help people be well. I’m most willing to adopt technologies that help me improve my patients’ health, and reduce burnout. It’s critical to look at who is the adopter of the technology and whether it will help me provide better care. Can that adoption of technology ensure that my billing and collections are better? You don’t want technology to be an additional burden on an already-busy life and schedule.

At MDisrupt we believe that the most impactful health products should make it to market quickly. We help make this happen by connecting digital health innovators to the healthcare industry experts and scientists they need to responsibly accelerate product development, commercialization, adoption, and scale.

Our expert consultants span the healthcare continuum and can assist with all stages of health product development: This includes regulatory, clinical studies and evidence generation, payor strategies, commercialization, and channel strategies. If you are building a health product, talk to us.

Are Telemedicine and Virtual Care Here to Stay?

Are Telemedicine and Virtual Care Here to Stay?

by | Jul 13, 2021

Aditi U Joshi

Meet Aditi U. Joshi, MD, MSc, chair of the telehealth committee for the American College of Emergency Physicians and former senior advisor of acute care telehealth at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.

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Dr. Joshi has worked in telehealth for over eight years, most recently leading Thomas Jefferson University Hospital’s on-demand telehealth program. She holds an assistant professorship in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Thomas Jefferson. Dr. Joshi is a champion of health innovation and has a passion for training students and residents about how technology is fundamentally transforming how we interact and care for patients.

An early adopter of telehealth

MDisrupt: How did your passion for health innovation and specifically telehealth evolve?

Aditi Joshi: I graduated residency in 2009 and started my career in a busy emergency department. After a few years, I had symptoms of burnout and decided to try something different. I found an advertisement for Doctor on Demand and decided to apply. This was in 2013 when they were just beginning. I was one of their first doctors and eventually became the assistant medical director. During my time there, I helped develop best-practice protocols to ensure patients were getting a quality visit.

In 2015, Thomas Jefferson University started a huge enterprise-wide telehealth program that piqued my interest. I eventually joined Jefferson in the department of emergency medicine and was the medical director of our telehealth program. My role here has been interesting because, as an academic center, there’s room to try new things. This is also encouraged by our CEO, Dr. Steve Klasko, who has a commitment to health innovation, creating home-based health care, and improving health equity. The team here has expanded and achieved a number of things like a direct-to-consumer program, a triage program in our emergency department, and telehealth education. We also have a telehealth fellowship for post-residency training.

MDisrupt: What is the difference between telehealth and telemedicine?

Aditi Joshi: Telemedicine is the actual service between the patient and the provider. Simply, it’s direct care or a medical encounter. The term telehealth is much broader because it’s not only the services but also includes preventive maintenance, follow-up, and the regulatory portions of telehealth. It’s a more relevant, all-encompassing term. In the future we’re going to realize that telemedicine, or telehealth, is just going to be part of healthcare and the “tele” is going to go away. We may call it virtual care, but eventually, it is just going to be healthcare.

Bringing telehealth to more people

MDisrupt: What are some of the challenges and solutions of adoption in telehealth?

Aditi Joshi: Reimbursement tends to be the biggest reason that clinics and hospitals have shied away from telehealth. It was viewed as an added amount of work without being able to charge for it. With the Emergency Care Act, telehealth got reimbursed to a much broader degree. In respect to that, telehealth visits cost less for both patients and payers. Of course, the caveat is sometimes we need to send patients to a higher level of care because not everything can be done via telehealth. When I first started out, there wasn’t much engagement by either clinicians or patients in telehealth. Patients would pay out of pocket for these types of visits—a limiting factor for many people. As more payers have adopted telemedicine, whether it’s a contract with companies that supply direct-to-consumer telemedicine or a hospital system, it has continued to evolve.

A second challenge is cost. The setup costs to cover technology can be prohibitive for small practices or hospitals that can’t buy the necessary software and hardware. With the realization that telehealth needs to be integrated into the future of healthcare, it’s important to consider the cost to establish these services.

Internet connectivity and access to phones and smart devices is a third major challenge. During the pandemic, there were a number of people in Philadelphia who could not access our platform due to connectivity and technology access. Given the dire emergency situation, my colleagues applied for a grant to do targeted outpatient testing via a mobile van. There’s a second round of grants that focuses on access and expansion of devices and internet connectivity. It’s probably the first time the government has really put that much money into this type of health innovation.

In the future, we’re going to have to figure out how we access rural areas. Today it’s being done with local community interventions such as setting up kiosks or enabling people to access the internet by coming to libraries and community centers.

How innovators can make a difference

MDisrupt: Many in our audience are digital health innovators who have access to capital, technologies, and engineers to build solutions. What could we do better and what are we not doing enough of?

Aditi Joshi:  It has been a beautiful thing to see how many people are committed to trying to improve healthcare with all of the digital health solutions that are out there.

When it comes to innovating in healthcare, it can be very complicated, so at the very least you have to understand the healthcare system and how it works.

The biggest complaint from clinicians is that health innovators don’t understand hospital workflows and so they create solutions that make it harder for us to get our jobs done. Physicians are overburdened, so adding something that isn’t useful or efficient or that can’t be reimbursed ends up being a problem. Some ways to get around this are really understanding what your solution is and ensuring that what you’re creating is solving a problem in the first place. I will say that speaking to clinicians early on is a really good idea—with the caveat that we don’t always know the right solution. It’s great to get people who are outside of medicine to innovate, but it’s important to have someone onboard, like a chief medical officer or an advisor, who understands how clinicians practice and how patients respond or use the solution.

MDisrupt: What advice would you give a founder who is interested in telehealth solutions and improving patient care?

Aditi Joshi: First and foremost, understand what you’re trying to solve and get the right team around you—people who work in a similar fashion and have similar goals. I usually give this advice to residents or medical students, but it also works for anybody who is starting a company or has an innovation.

When I started out in telehealth, I really enjoyed it. I kept saying yes to things. I said “yes” to being the assistant medical director, at Doctor on Demand. I said “yes” to Jefferson. And here at Jefferson, every time there was a new program where people came to us and said they want to try this telehealth solution, our department would say “yes” and then we would do it. It didn’t always work! We have a lot of programs we never brought to fruition, but every time we went through the thought process and the workflow it became easier and easier. Now if a health innovator were to ask me, “Can you set up a process to do this type of program?” I would say, “Absolutely!” I can do that because I’ve had practice through trial and error.

Telehealth, ten years out

MDisrupt: What will an interaction with the health system look like in ten years?

Aditi Joshi: I love this question because this is my favorite thing to work on. At the American College of Emergency Physicians, where I’m chair of telehealth, we have a task force looking into how we are going to define emergency medicine for the next five to 10 years because of telehealth.

First, there’s going to be a lot of home-based healthcare for patients with both acute and chronic disease. We’ll be able to use the emergency medical system for acute care and deliver a lot of what we can do in the emergency department at people’s homes. We can also employ more cross-consults which will allow patients to access specialists. We’ll be able to observe patients at home and take better care of them.

There’s also going to be better health literacy once we figure out how to make it palatable. We need to uncomplicate the terms we sometimes use in medicine, so patients can have more control over what they’re doing and what they understand for their health care. The future is going to rely on more individual practice and giving patients the ability to understand and improve their health along with us will be essential.

Medical education is going to change significantly for medical students, residents, and care providers. We’ll also have to continue to understand how smartphones are optimized to work in the healthcare space. They are part of our daily life and we need to make them part of our healthcare, too.

At MDisrupt we believe that the most impactful health products should make it to market quickly. We help make this happen by connecting digital health innovators to the healthcare industry experts and scientists they need to responsibly accelerate product development, commercialization, adoption, and scale.

Our expert consultants span the healthcare continuum and can assist with all stages of health product development: This includes regulatory, clinical studies and evidence generation, payor strategies, commercialization, and channel strategies. If you are building a health product, talk to us.

4 Things Digital Health Innovators Need to Know about Compliance

4 Things Digital Health Innovators Need to Know about Compliance

by | Apr 9, 2021

Deb Somerville

Deborah Somerville is a seasoned compliance expert with deep experience in healthcare and digital health environments. She’s held leadership positions at Everlywell, Genomic Health (now part of Exact Sciences), and Genentech, among others. Here, she shares four important lessons about the emerging area of compliance as it relates to digital health companies.

1. Gray areas are the norm.

Laboratory-developed tests (LDTs) have “regulatory discretion” with the FDA, which means that the FDA tends to pass off regulation of these tests to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). That leaves lots of question marks for digital health.

Digital health founders sometimes think that bringing in a compliance officer will get them a quick answer to the question of “Can we do this?” But there are not a lot of legal precedents or enforcement activity in our space. Market access for digital health is a murky soup—a lot depends on who you are marketing to. A compliance expert can help you clarify what is possible; sometimes you need to take a matrix approach to sort out exactly what applies to your product.

2. Compliance matters after an FDA clearance.

The agencies are saying “Tell us what you’re doing, and keep really good records, because we are all figuring this out.” For example, it’s important to set up a system to track communications. You don’t want to rely only on a verbal agreement. Transcribe all phone calls so you have a permanent record, send them back to the FDA, and say “Did this capture our conversation?”

It’s a requirement to track adverse events, including when the authorization is an emergency use authorization (EUA). The FDA is also interested in usability data, which is information beyond what is required for authorization. It helps with your relationship with the FDA to keep a database. For example, how do people feel about at-home tests? Do they sit on the kitchen counter for several days before they get mailed? What do the instructions say, and does feedback indicate they are easily followed?

Something else about working with regulators: If you make a mistake, and can show that there was a process and internal controls in place for decision making, and after the fact realized you didn’t use super-great judgment in reaching your decision—chances are the regulators won’t be extremely harsh. This was generally the case in life sciences overall, and now we are seeing this in digital health, too. And, it’s important to be proactive when you do discover such a “miss.” Self-disclosure is key.

3. Seize opportunities to influence emerging requirements.

Privacy, for instance, is one area where this is possible: The use of AI is expanding, and the ethical use of data derived by AI is a significant area. Will there be more regulation in this area? Changing regulations? It’s a great time for digital health innovators to get in and mold that regulation, for example, by lobbying, or by joining with other companies to respond with a white paper.

4. Expect a healthy tension between compliance and marketing.

For example, when you’re going through the FDA authorization process, once the FDA is familiar with a product, they will say, based on the product’s intended use, “Ok, this product will be called XYZ.” And it might be a very long name, which for a marketing person might be challenging to use in various media. But in this instance there is no room for negotiation—that is just how the FDA works.

In other instances, as a compliance professional, to find the best path forward I first have to think like a business person. Social media is a great example: How can we say what needs to be said in that media where we may have only a tiny bit of space? The way I think it through is, “What is the risk that I’m protecting the company from? How likely is that risk to be exploited? Can I quantify it—i.e., worst case, what would be the cost to the company? How much wiggle room—if any—do we have to take on a bit more risk?” The decision will be made by consensus of the executives, and rightly so, but the recommendation comes from the compliance person. As a team, we must be aligned to achieve our objectives, so education is a factor in that equation, too.

At MDisrupt we believe that the most impactful health products should make it to market quickly. We help make this happen by connecting digital health innovators to the healthcare industry experts and scientists they need to responsibly accelerate product development, commercialization, adoption, and scale.

Our expert consultants span the healthcare continuum and can assist with all stages of health product development: This includes regulatory, clinical studies and evidence generation, payor strategies, commercialization, and channel strategies. If you are building a health product, talk to us.

The Awesome Women Scientist-Founders Transforming Digital Health

The Awesome Women Scientist-Founders Transforming Digital Health

by | Mar 11, 2021

For Women’s History Month, we wanted to celebrate the accomplishments of female scientists who have founded digital health companies. Women scientists have started some amazing companies—but until now it hasn’t been easy to find information about many of them in one place. (It’s similar to what we discovered when we created our list of female physicians who are digital health founders.)

From gene editing to therapeutics to femtech to preventive care, check out some of the exciting ways that female scientist-founded companies are innovating in digital health.

We know that there are lots more of these companies out there! If you’re a female scientist founder, and would like to be included in this list, you can add yourself by clicking the button below:

 

Add me to the list

Jennifer Doudna, PhD

Company: Scribe Therapeutics
Scribe is focused on the engineering, delivery, and development of next-generation CRISPR molecules to rewrite and repair the underlying cause of genetic disorders.

Twitter:
LinkedIn: Jennifer Doudna, PhD

Rupal Patel, MHSc, PhD

Company: VocaliD
We make digital voice personal. Whether you’re a brand or individual, we have the synthetic voice solution for you.

Twitter: @TweetRupal
LinkedIn: Rupal Patel

Meesha Dogon, PhD

Company: Cardio Diagnostics
At Cardio Diagnostics we are transforming heart disease prevention through ML/AI and DNA-based solutions.

Twitter:
LinkedIn: Meesha Dogan, PhD

Janice Chen, PhD

Company: Mammoth Biosciences
At Mammoth, we discover novel CRISPR systems that enable new possibilities for expanding biology.

Twitter: @janiceschen
LinkedIn: Janice Chen

Elina Berglund Scherwitzl, PhD

Company: Natural Cycles
The only FDA cleared birth control app puts the power in the palm of your hand. Skip the pharmacy, no prescription needed.

Twitter: @EScherwitzl
LinkedIn: Elina Berglund Scherwitzl

Kate Rosenbluth, PhD

Company: Cala Health
Cala Health is a bioelectronic medicine company transforming the standard of care for chronic disease.

Twitter: @KateRosenbluth
LinkedIn: Kate Rosenbluth, PhD

Marina Pavlovic Rivas, MS

Company: Eli.Health
Eli enables women to take control of their health across their lives, by providing them with their daily hormone profile.

Twitter: @data_marina
LinkedIn: Marina Pavlovic Rivas

Áine Behan, MSc, PhD

Company: Cortechs
At Cortechs, we use brain powered play and brainwaves as a tool to improve behaviours such as attention in easily distracted children that want to improve their focus.

Twitter: @cortechs_ab
LinkedIn: Áine Behan

Darlene Higbee Clarkin, RHN

Company: KORE Digital Health Therapeutics
KORE Digital Health Therapeutics is optimizing digestive health outcomes through behaviour change, progressive nutritional education and evidence-based digital therapeutics.

Twitter: 
LinkedIn: Darlene Higbee Clarkin, RHN

Raeanne Moore, PhD

Company: KeyWise AI
KeyWise AI develops AI software that tracks brain function, objectively & precisely.

Twitter: @raeannephd
LinkedIn: Raeanne Moore, PhD

Kate Wolin, ScD

Company: Coeus Health
Coeus Health unlocks the tools to provide health and wellness programs that work.

Twitter: @DrKateWolin
LinkedIn: Kate Wolin

Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, PhD

Company: Biocon
An innovation-led fully integrated biopharmaceutical company that develops affordable biosimilars, novel biologics & complex APIs

Twitter: @KiranShaw
LinkedIn: Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, PhD

Jane Wang, BSc

Company: Optimity
Optimity makes a gamified health rewards platform that applies nudge science to support a proactive approach to holistic healthy living.

Twitter: @JaneJwang
LinkedIn: Jane Wang

Maggie Bergeron, MSc

Company: Embodia
Online continuing education for physiotherapists plus digital home exercise and patient engagement software.

Twitter: @maggiebpt
LinkedIn: Maggie Bergeron

Cecile Real

Company: Endodiag
We develop new endometriosis diagnostic solutions to contribute to a better endometriosis diagnosis, a more personalized patient management, more efficient treatment options and fertility strategy.

Twitter:
LinkedIn: Cecile Real

Isabel Van De Keere, PhD

Company: Immersive Rehab
Immersive Rehab creates personalised digital therapeutics neurorehabilitation programmes in virtual reality with the aim to improve patient recovery.

Twitter: @ScienceRoadie
LinkedIn: Isabel Van De Keere, PhD

Elizabeth Iorns, PhD

Company: Science Exchange
Science Exchange, the R&D Services Management company, empowers research organizations to accelerate science and drive innovation success.

Twitter: @elizabethiorns
LinkedIn:Elizabeth Iorns, PhD

Alicia Jackson, PhD

Company: Evernow
Preventive primary care, powered by technology

Twitter:
LinkedIn: Alicia Jackson

Jennifer Doudna, PhD

Company: Mammoth Biosciences
At Mammoth, we discover novel CRISPR systems that enable new possibilities for expanding biology.

Twitter:
LinkedIn: Jennifer Doudna, PhD

Kate Wolin, ScD

Company: Circea
Circea guides clients in threading the needle between evidence and commercial need in health behavior change.

Twitter: @DrKateWolin
LinkedIn: Kate Wolin

Amanda French, BSE

Company: Emme
Emme is a healthcare technology company with a mission to put women’s health in women’s hands, starting with birth control.

Twitter:
LinkedIn:Amanda French

Claire Novorol, PhD

Company: Ada
Ada’s core system connects medical knowledge with intelligent technology to help all people actively manage their health and medical professionals to deliver effective care.

Twitter: @clairenovorol
LinkedIn: Claire Novorol

Geetha Manjunath, PhD

Company: Niramai
Niramai Health Analytix is a non-contact privacy-aware breast cancer screening solution that detects early stage breast abnormalities.

Twitter: @geethamhp
LinkedIn: Geetha Manjunath

Nabiha Saklayen, PhD

Company: Cellino
Cellino Biotech develops intracellular delivery lasers and nanotechnology for gene editing applications.

Twitter: @nabsicle
LinkedIn: Nabiha Saklayen, PhD

Parastoo Khoshakhlagh, Ph.D

Company: GC Therapeutics, Inc
GC Therapeutics Inc. (GCTx) uses synthetic biology to program patient-derived stem cells into any cell type with best-in-class efficiency (up to 10X), speed (up to 100X) and scalability.

Twitter: @Parastoo__KH
LinkedIn: Parastoo Khoshakhlagh, Ph.D

Mona Schreiber

Mona Schreiber, VP of Marketing, MDisrupt

Mona is a marketing leader with over 15 years b2b experience developing new healthcare markets. Prior to joining MDisrupt, she was an early marketing lead at Invitae Inc, where she helped scale the company from small startup to market leader in the nascent genetic testing industry. She brings with her a deep understanding of global markets from her international marketing work at Invitae and Affymetrix.

At MDisrupt we believe that the most impactful health products should make it to market quickly. We help make this happen by connecting digital health innovators to the healthcare industry experts and scientists they need to responsibly accelerate product development, commercialization, adoption, and scale. Our expert consultants span the healthcare continuum and can assist with all stages of health product development: This includes regulatory, clinical studies and evidence generation, payor strategies, commercialization, and channel strategies. If you are building a health product, talk to us.