This month’s Digital Health Videocast sees us sit down with Brian Dolan, Founder and lead writer of Exits & Outcomes (E&O), following the highly successful launch of our latest industry report ‘Prescription Digital Therapeutics (PDT) The Future of Digital Therapeutics’ co-created by HealthXL and E&O.
For those of you following our videocast series, there may be a sense of déjà vu as we learn of Brian’s early career connection with Washington DC (much like our previous sit-downs with Sarah Iselin, Chris Coburn and Steve Kraus). Having attended Boston University and taking advantage of their excellent journalism school Brian was to find himself placed in Washington DC as a political correspondent for a semester. A career as a political journalist was not on the cards but Washington had captivated him. On graduating from Boston University Brian moved to the nation’s capital permanently as an editor for the media brand Fierce Markets. It was during his tenure here in which he was exposed to both technology and healthcare publications, helping to launch a series of publications focused on mobile in the mid-2000s.
We learn of his passion as he watched the mobile industry evolve out of nothing, indeed an industry that would be paramount to the evolution of healthcare. On seeing mobile solutions being adopted across industries Brian felt there was ample opportunity to integrate it with the healthcare industry who had not fully embraced it yet and so in 2008 MobiHealthNews was born as a health tech publication.
Brian’s understanding of the fusion and possibilities between technology and healthcare has evolved over the past decade as the industry moved from the early days of med-tech to what we know now as digital health.
“Digital health has come to mean so many things” Brian tells us and it is perhaps for this reason he founded Exits & Outcomes in 2019. “Digital health has matured considerably in the past 12 years since I first started writing about it, but most health tech journalism is still written for those just entering the discussion. Exits & Outcomes (E&O) is a subscription-only, weekly newsletter for digital health strategists, creatives, and operators.”
It is Brian's experience in this industry that makes him such a valuable collaborator on our latest industry report. HealthXL released our first industry report on Digital Therapeutics (DTx) back in 2018 but so much has changed since then. A wide variety of companies have co-opted the term “digital therapeutics'' to describe their digital health offerings. We discuss our collaboration on the report which seeks to cut through some of that noise by focusing on a smaller promising subset of this group: prescription digital therapeutics.
A key part of our conversation turns to how we may define DTx with Brian summing up “The key to it is (DTx) are not just interventions but they have some sort of evidence to back them up...These are interventions that actually work”.
During the videocast we dive into a number of areas including:
- How did Brian get into journalism and how did it morph into an interest in digital health.
- The early years of MobiHealthNews.
- What do we mean by prescription digital therapeutics and why was it the focus of this report.
- What might the next wave of PDT look like?
- Key takeaways of the report.
- And perhaps most importantly, Brian's passion for brewing.
What does the future of DTx look like to you. ? Get in touch with us here!
HealthXL Executive members can access the report for free on the Community Hub. If you are not an Executive member yet, you can access an 11-page snapshot for free here.
