In May 2014 in Dublin, Ireland, we set our Moonshots to promote innovation in health. Two years later, are we still on the right trajectory?
The day it started. HealthXL was born out of the need to collaborate in new ways. To work together as partners to drive innovation in health and healthcare. The journey started almost two years ago in Dublin. Over three intensive days in May 2014 we held what would turn out to be the first of our regular meetings. The meetings brought together some of the most experienced global experts in digital health to look at how we could collaborate in new ways. Some of those experts became the first HealthXL Members and Advisors. We called the event the HealthXL Global Gathering. This made it clear the innovation could come from anywhere and that none of us could afford to continue to work isolation/silos.
The idea was simple: Big healthcare problems cannot be solved in isolation. But they could be through collaboration.
With that understanding, together we set ourselves a number of ambitious goals. These goals were chosen in terms of their potential to have a meaningful impact on millions of lives. They became what would later be called the HealthXL Moonshots. As such they could take us 10 years or 20 years to achieve, maybe more. In short, we understood what we wanted to do, but by definition had no understanding of how we were to get there. As a community we needed a mixture of urgency and patience if we had a chance of meeting our goals and reaching our destination.
The HealthXL Moonshots:
- Connected Health: To provide connected health for every patient regardless of the time, place, or device
- Behavior Change: To support informed and empowered consumers competing to be healthy
- Big Data: To increase life expectancy and improve quality of life through big data
“The intellect and the thought process that HealthXL went through to help us build the three Moonshots that we did, to me was just amazing," said Bill Taranto, Merck Global Health Investment Fund.
The Stepping stones on the journey to the Moonshots - the HealthXL Challenges
Early on we realized that trying to boil the ocean wouldn’t get us very far. We had to break down the Moonshots and focus on specific problems and use them as stepping stones on the journey. We had to think about the consumer or the patient and how those problems applied to their lives. We had to foster and bring together a complete ecosystem of partners to figure out how to build something that consumers, patients, payors and providers wanted and could afford. Those stepping stones, we called the HealthXL Challenges. We had to make sure those Challenges were relevant to the HealthXL Members strategic interests Driven by an urgent and important issue that they wanted to tackle, they would take ownership and lead the collaborative project going forward.
One small step for the patient, one giant leap for healthcare Fast forward today and we have completed a total of six Global Gatherings, with the latest one yesterday in San Francisco. More importantly, we now have nine HealthXL Challenges up and running. Each of them helps us move the HealthXL Moonshots forward - step by step. It has taken all of us time to understand how to complete a Challenge. We have iterated on the approach a number of times to optimise the process. And because none of this was in isolation, none of it was left unsolved, for us and the HealthXL Members it was important to understand the value hook of a Challenge (i.e it is not amount simply buying or sell rather co-creation of solutions with all stakeholders involved during the process).
- Connected Health: To provide connected health for every patient regardless of the time, place, or device
- Behavior Change: To support informed and empowered consumers competing to be healthy
- Big Data: To increase life expectancy and improve quality of life through big data
Over the past 12 months we have published insightful reports on Aging, Medication Adherence, and Sleep, with more in the pipeline. We have also started to find a repeatable process and started to see the first flickers of light in terms of:
The trajectory is intricate and complex. But we have picked up fellow astronauts along the way to help us prevail the journey. We now have a community of 23 HealthXL Members, representing the leading healthcare firms globally.
This week: thought leaders, relevant topics, actionable insights Yesterday at the sixth HealthXL Global Gathering we had a fantastic opportunity to reflect where we are on the journey and define the next steps together.
During the day we discussed a series of HeathXL Challenges including COPD, Heart Failure, Infectious Disease, and Sleep. We reviewed these in terms of very specific actions to move faster towards meaningful output as a group, based on our Challenge canvas to help understand the enablers and potential barriers to scaling up innovation.
What’s next in 2016 The first steps on a very long journey are already behind us. And we press on relentlessly, steadfastly and dreaming for the Moon(shots). Our next events where we will carry on the collaboration are:
- on September 21st in Boston for Behavior Change with a focus on clinical trials, wellness, and scaling innovation,
- on November 3rd in Singapore for Connected Health with a focus on aging, patient empowerment, and workplace health.
- on November 10th-12th in Melbourne for Big Data with a focus on digital outpatients, respiratory and infectious diseases, and aging.
Passionate about health challenges? If you are passionate about the health challenges we are working on, you can connect with our community of key healthcare stakeholders by joining the HealthXL Platform. This will allow you to engage and collaborate with them at any time and from any place - except maybe the moon (yet). We are looking for passionate individuals and organizations who truly want to work in new ways to solve these important problems.
