Linklaters Conference in New York

1.
New York City; March 16, 2016
The Linklater’s Healthcare Roundtable Conference.
Conference Leader: Bill Smith, CEO and Founder of Brand Acumen and
Chairman of Harrison Hayes.
Topic: Ways in which stranded health technologies can be combined into
profitable new mass-market offerings to help realize opportunities in the
new consumer-focused health care market
This meeting continued the eHealth and developing technologies theme of recent
New York sessions. The last one involved a discussion on the disruptive power
of digital technology in the healthcare sector. The discussion was kindly led by
Bill Smith, CEO and Founder of Brand Acumen, the world leader in brand name
development, and Chairman and Managing Director at Harrison Hayes, a Life
Science Venture Capital Firm that focuses on innovation and ideation.
Key themes included:
• Convergence and collaboration is crucial for evolution of ideas,
businesses and technologies. Fora such as this one play a symbiotic role and
should be capitalized on. The group should use the opportunity to ask questions
and tap into networks
• If healthcare is to innovate successfully, it needs to learn from other
industries
• Identify demand before looking for the product/solution/commercial partner
– not the other way around
• The growing opportunities that wearables present, particularly for future
generations of Apple watches
• Data protection and security is still a big concern when it comes to the
tech space – less so in the U.S. (for now), but this is a particularly hot topic in
Europe
Q&A
• How can we stimulate innovation and evolution as a company? By coming
together – a very successful past model for Bill was to invite the CIO’s at
companies outside of the healthcare sphere (e.g. Pixar, Boeing, P&G, Pepsi) to
discuss ideas in a non-competitive atmosphere where intel is not proprietary.
This proved to be extremely fruitful in identifying common themes and potential
cross-industry solutions

2.
• Who are the big players going to be as the market develops? Apple’s
opportunity is huge; others like Samsung have an excellent offering but struggle
with external factors such as an oligarchic home environment
• At what point does privacy become a real barrier? How different is an
Apple Watch tracking you to a yearly health review with your insurance company
where your level of cholesterol can dictate your annual fee?
• How do you take the basic unit and commercialize it? Discussed difficulty
of every stage of development, from obtaining seed money to getting an idea
through the discovery/proof of concept phase, then through the clinical trials.
People are focused on returns at end but these are still real hurdles
• Where are the health insurers? UnitedHealthGroup’s most profitable
business is Optum – there are a number of converging pieces here, and they
invest their money in artificial intelligence and modelling
• Is there a different take-up of ideas based on nationalities? U.S.-
headquartered companies can move more quickly in general (followed by
German, then French and Swiss companies)
• How do we address the issue of security and data as a toxic asset (as set
out by Bruce Schneier in a recent article)? Do big data repositories need to be
viewed in a negative way as a big liability? When do regulators start looking at
data repositories in a very critical way? Goldman Sachs is investing US$3bn a
year into IT – how do we tackle this when opportunities presented by data sets
also put us in a vulnerable position?
• What about the increasingly strict regulatory environment? There are
antitrust concerns about joint ventures between manufacturers – this raises
collusion/horizontal issues
Feedback
• Even with knowledgeable investors (e.g. Life Sciences Angel Network in
New York – a group of physicians, investors, lawyers), early stage research is
not a tenable investment area due to time, risk and money. The risk with PMA is
too high and the length of time is too difficult. How do we get around this issue?
• We need inter-industry convergence. Medical school hospitals are
competing rather than working together – if they can attain convergence this is a
big opportunity. We need to convince them to share by getting them to meet at
CEO level
• True convergence is a sustainable model such as Ascension Health, a
faith-based healthcare organization. They invest in companies that their hospitals
are working with, taking feedback from the market about which products are
working and putting their own capital into it
• A diverse board can help inject an innovative spirit and culture of being a
sounding board to each other – e.g. Sharecare’s board being a mix of
representatives from hospitals, media companies, tech companies

3.
• Correlation Ventures is an interesting one to watch – it is a database
containing characteristics of deals that have been successful, and an algorithm is
used to vet new technologies
• Interest from, and investment by, Chinese entities (including, recently PE
houses) is rapidly increasing
• Knowing where the opportunities are can compress time – a commercial
partner can come in and invest the resources to proceed, and with this extra step
of doing your market research you are speeding up the timeframe it takes to get
to final stage, thus creating value
Other Considerations (possibly for future discussions)
• What kind of convergence will we see with wearables as they become
more prevalent and sophisticated? Will this drive more collaboration amongst
industries when technology catches up? E.g. healthcare, technology and
retail/fashion/lifestyle all coming together via demand for clothing with
biosensors, or even via internal biosensors which will help doctors track patients
with chronic conditions. Where does the line get drawn between what is helpful
and what is (a) risky from a privacy standpoint and (b) creating a “Big Brother”
type atmosphere of constant surveillance, particularly with internal sensors
providing feedback?