Name: Fortune Global Forum 2023: Health Care’s Big Moment
Uploaded: 2023-11-29
Duration: 19 min 48 s
Description: Shaista Asif, Co-founder and Group COO, PureHealth Geoff Martha, Chairman and CEO, Medtronic In conversation with: Alyson Shontell, FORTUNE

Shaista Asif, Co-founder and Group COO, PureHealth  Geoff Martha, Chairman and CEO, Medtronic In conversation with: Alyson Shontell, FORTUNE

Fortune Global Forum 2023: Health Care’s Big Moment 

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Moving to a very different topic. Um The integration of A I into global health care holds the potential to revolutionize the industry while addressing and overcoming the challenges that arise along the way. And while there are clear benefits, there are also concerns. In fact, the World Health Organization recently outlined what called key areas of regulatory consideration with regards to the utilization of A I and health. The idea is to offer countries guidance to help regulate A I and the health space while harnessing its potential. They include the importance of transparency, documentation, risk management, data validation, privacy and data protection and collaboration between stakeholders. Today, we want to talk about the innovations, challenges and benefits of digital tools and health to help us lead this. I'm going to have fortune editor in chief Alice Allison Chantelle is going to join us on stage along with Shisha Asif, who's a co founder and group coo of pure health, the largest integrated health care network in the UAE the cross category ecosystem that covers hospitals, clinics, diagnostics, insurance, pharmacies, health, tech procurement, and more. And then we have Jeff Martha, the chairman and CEO of Metronic, a global leader in health care technology with a team of more than 90,000 people in 150 countries. Please welcome them to the Fortune Global Forum. That's we think that's the wrong. Good afternoon, everyone. Great to see all of you. And, and we're actually working for being here, mission set up a nonprofit and that's, that's something we wanna talk about. Like that would be really interesting, do that. Uh And now my mic is working now, you can really hear me great. Um So, hey, guys, backstage mics are on. Ok, here we go. Um OK, so on the way to start, well, one thing I realized with is like the state of health care today, I think we're in this transition from it being um a really reactive industry where you go to the doctor when you're sick, you're not feeling good, you go get a test done or something. Um But it's really not that helpful for preventing things and being proactive with things. Um So where are we in making that transition as health care as an industry from being really reactive to proactive? All right, you want me to start? Well, first of all, a good job, but now now getting the interesting start there and, and thanks for having me. Um look, so Metronic, we treat um we deal generally with pretty sick people, right? We're a global leader in medical devices and cardiology, neuroscience, surgery and diabetes and uh like I said we're dealing with people that have been diagnosed generally. With the problem. We do some diagnosis but mainly therapy. Uh and they're, they're fairly sick people generally. And so what we try to do at this point is be more proactive at preventing an escalation, right? So that's really what we're doing. We're not really at the wellness stage, I will say though that um with the advent of A I and the explosion of data, we're using that to move upstream. So today we treat two patients every second. That sounds like a lot. But when you do the math, it's 80 million people a year. The world has, you know, over a billion people. So there's for us to move upstream to be more proactive. It is around data and A I I believe is the key. So just in in our world today, um you know, as we move up, we are using uh data and A I to to be more proactive and to identify problems earlier and prevent that escalation. So like one example I can give you a bunch. 11 would be like diabetes management. So we, we provide for insulin dependent diabetics, a closed loop system here of a insulin delivery device like a pump, they wear tied tethered to a, you know, a continuous glucose monitoring system all tied together with an algorithm and we're testing their blood sugars every five minutes and using A I to predict based on their past behavior, what's going to happen and try to microdose insulin uh to avoid uh a high sugar, high or low. Uh And so we are preventing escalations using so that's kind of more like what we're doing and over time wanna move from these sick people to less sick to high risk to more what, you know, preventative. But we're, we, we've got a ways to go on that and Shasta, I know um I wanna hear your thoughts on this as well, but I know an important initiative for you is longevity. Um And there's a lot of progress working around health spans so that you're not just living a longer life, but you're actually enjoying more years of your life and able to do more with the longer years of your life. And you have a 100 and one by 2071 initiative. Uh Hopefully, that's the time for me to make it. That would be great. Um But I'm curious, where are we in that path? And, and how does uh preventative care work into that? So I'll try and, and club both your questions with one answer. So the entire ethos are based on which your health vision is based and our vision personally is based is the ability to give people more time, which is longevity, which is preventive care. Unfortunately, the health care system of today is is sick care. It's not preventive health care. It's when you like you mentioned when you get sick, you walk into a hospital, you get treated and how hospitals are structured is more like hotels, come and enjoy our stay, enjoy the minibar, enjoy the pool, enjoy, you know, so this is how the entire business of health care is being delivered right now. And we want to deviate away from this, which is why longevity is, is just, it's, it's a natural margin to what you know, we want to do. Now, when we talk about longevity, longevity is let's uh slice in into longevity is having the ability to have a larger health span, a longer health span and thus pushing your lifespan more and more sorry. And when we talk about it, we have an individual who is 25% 25% of his longevity is dependent on his 20 to 25% on his genetics. And the rest of the 75 to 80% is dependent on epigenetics. Now, I think we'll need a separate panel on data and A I and gene sequencing. That's, that's a whole different conversation, but we're delving into that and we're being able to identify now what our code consists of and what we can do to prevent something which would naturally happen, you know, otherwise. But the rest of the 80% which is your epigenetics, that is your environment, your conditions, your access to health care, the choices that you make, which determine how long and how healthy you would live and how we're enabling that through technology. And A I is imagine if every single individual here in this room had a personal physician, a personal trainer, a nutritionist, a mental health coach, a pharmacist and whatnot. All of them available with you. 24 7. Guiding you every step of your journey of your life. Would you for sure, have a healthier life for sure. I mean, don't eat this, eat that you need to exercise more. Your BM I is now going towards an healthy level. You need to bring it back down, you need to visit a doctor. Your heart rate is abnormal stress levels are getting high. That's what we're hoping to deliver through the use of technology and A I through the application that we've built Pura that integrates all your health records, data from your wearables, your skins from, from your smart mirrors, your smart bathrooms and it guides you on the best possible journey for a longer health span. So it sounds like also tech will bring down the cost quite significantly because I too would love a dietitian and a nutritious and all these things, a personal trainer with me all the time. And you're saying tech can be that solution and it can be for everybody. Yes, absolutely. Tech is the only way to democratize health care. There is an estimated 15 mi shortage of 15 million uh clinicians in the world right now as we speak, there is no way to have to plug this hole through just normal. I mean, uh when we say just physicians, human physicians, if there's no way, the only way to bridge that gap is through technology. And A I. So, um e every health expert says like this is the golden age right now. What we're seeing the pace of innovation in health tech is astronomical. It's not like anything we've seen in the last 100 years. I'm curious both of your perspectives. Um What do you think is coming like, what are, what is A I gonna enable us to really do that? You're really excited about whether it's a device that you all are working on. And I think your diabetes, one is a great example. But like what's something where in 10 years it will just be sort of the mind blown. Do you think of what we can achieve? Well, look, I I think um in the medical device space, we're at an inflection point. There's, there's a lot of great innovation and traditional biomedical engineering. You know, I think mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, you know, miniaturization of technology, you combine that with what we're learning about the human body. Uh And you combine it with digital technologies as digital comes into med tech. So think uh you know A I edge computing cloud computing, quantum computing, you know, five G uh all of this is is and then I put robotics in that bucket, uh you know, a game changer and what it's allowing us to do is, is personalized care at scale. Uh, you know, it, it for and, and, and I totally concur with what you're saying about physicians, tech is the only path forward. You can't, you know, if you're not personalizing, you're gonna get, you know, you're not gonna get the outcomes that you're looking for and you don't have the human capital to do this. It has to be uh technology. So in our world, things like we treat Parkinson's disease, we, we have a implantable device that stimulates certain parts of your brain that mitigates the um the effects of Parkinson's the uh the movement issues. Uh And it's an amazing therapy called uh you know, brain stimulation, brain modulation. And, you know, you see the, the, the, the the symptoms of that you turn this on and the patient is calm and smooth. It's, it's an amazing and it, and it slows down the progression of Parkinson's. The problem with it is is that patients need to keep coming back into the neurologist and with the Metronic um person there as well uh to reprogram the device as the disease progresses with A I and, and, and, and cloud computing, we can do this automatically and personalize it to that person. Uh their, their needs. So that's an example of another one that I'll give you one more example of surgery surgery today. Uh is becoming more and more robotically driven uh with uh all kinds of enabling technologies, imaging and navigation and visualization and tools. A I now we're collecting enough data that we're not too far away from. I'll call it a driver assist technology in the or for surgeons. So we're, you know, A I is not gonna replace the surgeon anytime soon, but surgeons using A I will be replacing those that don't. Uh because this, this technology is, is just democratizing good health care uh where you're not so reliant on training, it's taking average docs and making them really good docs and that's not out in the future that is today. So these things I can give you more, those are two different types of examples. Um And to this point, I mean, like taking an electrophysiologist that treats cardiac rhythm and and atrial fibrillation in the United States, you know, there may be a ratio of 100 to 11 of those electrophysiologists for 100 people, you get into the developing world, it's a million to one. I mean, you can't, you can't train enough. So the technology is the only path forward and it, and it is exciting, it is a golden era as you all are thinking about keeping up how as CEO S and executives, you think about keeping up with the pace of innovation. Um There's a few avenues to explore obviously your own R and D budgets, um acquisitions partnerships. Um Sha I know that you guys made a big investment in the US and health care system here or uh there, I'm from the US um recently. Uh and uh Jeff, I know you've done partnerships with all sorts of companies including spacex and Apple. How do you think about when to do what and what can accelerate fast enough for your businesses? So, um health care, when we know technologically has always been behind the other industries, you know, while the rest of the industries are racing towards the four ir health care in most parts of the world isn't stuck in the tail end of the second or the beginning of the third. And that gives us immense opportunity to go in into these areas and to leapfrog them towards the four ir so I think so, first of all, a just to add on to the previous question, COVID was the Chief Transformation Officer for Health Care Technology, the way that it was adapted and the way that it was absorbed by not just medical professionals but patients, it accelerated it. And that's why we're in that golden era of technology. Now we're growing obviously at an exponential speed. But the way that we want to grow is to be able to reach the areas where there is a shortage of health care where there is that ratio of one is 200,000. You know, you know, uh pa patients, one physician for 100,000 patients or where there is that dirt. So we're wanting to go into those areas. We're wanting to take them into the fold and to bring our technological investments from Abu Dhabi to the rest of the world to take them with us on this journey, you know, for us in the, in the med tech space, there's a lot of different technologies and it's, it's hard to invent everything yourself. Uh And the barriers to get in are, are relatively, have been relatively low. So we're very proud of our organic R and D. We, we spend, we invest, not spend, invest, you know, over $3 billion a year in, in, in R and D clinical trials plus technology development into products. But we do have a venture arm that's investing in start ups and a and a healthy mergers and acquisitions team because sometimes somebody, uh you know, often times, you know, innovators from around the world, it's, it's global now, you know, you're seeing that this happened all over the world, come up with something uh very unique. And so we'll invest and, and, and maybe by that company. Uh so the answer is when somebody comes up with something that's truly innovative, uh and they're, they're ahead of us that that's when we really, it's something that we're interested in is, is where we'll, we'll do m and A uh in terms of buying technology, but we also do um COVID, it was a transformational time and that's when we started to do it. We realize that maybe we should look beyond the medical technology industry for R and D innovations. That's where we partner with spacex as we uh open sourced our ventilator. During COVID, we, we had some real challenges scaling it. There's a particular part called a proportional solenoid valve. Never heard of it. But it turns out if you think about a ventilator as a life support system, guess what they need on spacecraft life support systems. And it turns out that SpaceX had a, had a, had a real, a good product there, a good component. And they, you know, Elon helped us there quite a bit. So, you know, we've, we've done more open sourcing since then. It was a real lesson learned uh is to not just think about other medical technology companies, but the broader tech industry. And uh so we've got a lot of more big tech partnerships these days. And the, the last type of partnership we're doing is with health care providers because the key for us is to make sure this technology is fully integrated into the care pathways of the different health systems and health systems operate differently around the world. So it's not a one size fits all. So we find ourselves inventing the technology and then having deep partnerships with uh different health delivery uh organizations, big hospitals, small clinics, what have you to make sure our technology we know how to integrate it into their work flow so that they use it. Uh I just want to give people a little bit of context here. Uh Jeff is being modest. I think he had the hardest job in COVID. Maybe of anyone on the planet, he became CEO of Metronic 23 weeks, maybe before COVID hits. Uh, and Metronic supplies a third of the world's ventilators. And if you remember at the beginning of the crisis, I mean, there was such a short and you made a bold move to open source. Um So others can make this like spacex. Um So I'm curious actually from both of you, if this was such a transformation agent, um not just for your company but for your leadership, like what do you take forward from the COVID era to further accelerate your companies now? Um How are they better future proofed because of what you had to go through in those times? So I think what um we underwent a transformation ourselves as healthcare entity, you know, during COVID COVID was a wake up call to everyone who was taking it just as, as like we said, you know, business as usual COVID accelerated the need for change. COVID accelerated the need for preventive care even more. So, uh it accelerated the need for a physician for you to have health care at your fingertips, in the comfort of your home, in the palm of your hand and it, it provided everyone the tools to access it out of necessity. So the learning that I think we took from COVID was that while technology may be a luxury, still in certain parts of the world, for hospital providers, for health care providers, it is an absolute necessity for all of us. If you're wanting to take this towards the future and towards that preventive care, it is an absolute necessity. Uh We invested a lot in the R and D. We, we again, you know, like you mentioned, it was absolutely necessary to go into clinical trials into seeing what we needed to do when it came to stem cell regeneration. When it came to uh you know, tackling sick care when it came to taking the population, population health management say, for example, so all of these things came in as a part of learning of COVID and when we applied them, it was how aptly and uh and, and, and agile we were, you know, in, in this application that gained us the momentum to move forward. Now, I think for me, you mentioned, you know, becoming CEO right at the beginning of COVID. And um you can look at that as a challenge and, and I look back at it as a as AAA great learning experience and opportunity. And you re one of the, the, the things I, you know, COVID struck me as, you know, we're in health care and it is a privilege and, and just how important health is, is to, you know, humanity and society and to the global economy and, and that we need to kind of think a little bigger and the partnerships, open sourcing. Um you know, a company like ours with a lot of technology, but we have gaps and making yourself vulnerable, taking the risk and, and, and, and, and having these partnerships, the partnerships has been real accelerator for us and in our innovation and how we think about it. So that's one, the second is less um uh sexy uh uh but supply chain. Uh how, when we as, as the world is globalized, uh how long supply chains have gotten and how we've lost sight of where our components are coming from and, and how geopolitics or climate, you know, issues can affect our supply chain. We saw that during COVID and, and it caused us to really revamp uh one have a, a deeper understanding of our supply chain, 345 layers deep um and building that resiliency as well. Uh So those two things uh are, are big ones, partnerships and supply chain. Well, thank you both so much uh for your efforts to make the world healthier to help us all live longer. Um And thank you for joining me on stage, Jeff. Thank you.