July 20188 THE RISE OF DIGITAL HEALTH AND NEED FOR PARTNERSHIPS IN THE ASIAN PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY I spent about seven years in management consulting, ending my career as the Life Sciences practice leader for Oliver Wyman across APAC. Our region, densely populated with over 3 billion people and wildly heterogeneous healthcare systems, is experiencing a fundamentally insufficient supply of healthcare resources and a significant gap in the affordability of healthcare services, most notably ethical pharmaceutical products.A significant part of my work focused on large multinational pharmaceutical companies looking for guidance on non-traditional market access routes--this meant creating innovative business models and building successful partnerships with insurers, providers financial institutions, and even startups, that could overcome some of the financing, education, and delivery challenges that prevented the success of both traditional and novel market access approaches. We also helped our clients develop strategies to generate the right kind and level of evidence conveying the value of their medicines and how to engage critical public and private sector stakeholders to best deliver said evidence. As a part of my client engagements, I discovered many entrepreneurs working towards improving their local health systems yet struggling to find the capital to do so, even with a clear business case and strong technology foundation. I started investing in these companies in a personal capacity, and very recently left Oliver Wyman to start Verge Capital Management to do this full-time with a couple of likeminded partners. Our mission is to extend healthy life spans of all people and we are doing this by providing capital to early stage companies focused on disease prevention, health system efficiency, and curative therapies. Trends Transforming the Pharmaceutical Industry in AsiaWhile the pharmaceutical industry might be under constant internal transformation and consistently at the top of biomedical innovation, the business model itself has not changed very much in the past decades. However, with the increasing veracity, velocity and ubiquity of information, and the accompanying exponential changes in technology powered by it, they will soon need to rethink the way they work, prioritize and conduct research, innovate, manufacture and meet stakeholder expectations. I say stakeholder as it is no longer a monologue with physicians as key decision makers but rather full conversations with public and private payers, other healthcare practitioners, health system administrators, service partners and most importantly, the patients themselves. As such, I have seen three major trends rise here in Asia in response to some of these looming changes. Firstly, pharmaceutical companies have finally started to realize that digital health is an important enabler that overcomes some of the traditional limitations on providing services `beyond the pill.' They have begun engaging with digital health companies on topics such as cloud-based disease management programs, expanded patient access and support programs, and enablement of novel financing mechanisms, to help make their treatments more affordable, accessible and accountable. BY DR. JOSEPH MOCANU, MANAGING DIRECTOR, VERGE CAPITAL MANAGEMENT IN MY V EW
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