fortis Fortuna adiuvat
aka fortune favors the bold
I usually write a blog post at the end of the year, summarizing challenges, experiences, achievements and making projections for the next year. I didn’t follow this tradition in the last turn of the ‘special’ 2020 and instead I decided to write a short story that strengthens the proverb “fortune favors the brave”. Hence, the 2nd of January of 2021 finds me with a double espresso *that will only last for the first paragraph* in front of my screen, full of energy to put together the pieces of 2020 that complete the puzzle of the paradox of clinical research; a very critical industry that was paving the digital transformation path in a laggard pace until now.
It is mid of February 2020 and I am landing in Schiphol, probably under the worst weather ever landed (Ciara storm — see video from a previous flight). A week ago, I had a another nasty flight experience coming back from Paris, again thinking that it was among the worst flight experiences of my frequent flyer’s career, after turbulences caused while falling for some hundred meters. “How worse can my flights be in 2020?”, I whispered. I had no idea that after Amsterdam and another two trips that followed, I would have stopped traveling all together due to Covid-19.
Back to Amsterdam… I am attending the conference of the European CRO Federation, a very well organized event with excellent speakers, exhibitors (among them Healthentia in our first attempt as a standalone product 🤙), social events and… speed dating. I cloned myself to speed-date 10+ professionals in 2 days and tell them our early findings from virtual clinical studies and our SaaS plans to democratize Real World Data (RWD). I remember to have met very good professionals, with strong experiences and clientèle pedigree, but most of them were telling me “Clinical Research is a very slow moving industry and most of sponsors care about hand-written outcomes. It will take for ever until they switch to full electronic approaches”. I dared to disclose some of our AI activities for processing RWD, digital phenotyping and ML-based discovery of digital composite biomarkers; they were all out of context😒. Nevertheless, I made good friends and put fundamentals for good synergies, but it was clear to me that our first attempt to exhibit Healthentia and its advantages as an end-to-end eClinical platform, was accompanied by the tough reality that we are addressing a small niche -at least in Europe- with questionable CAGR. Needless to say that namedropping of our features, like eRecruitment, eConsent, smart sensing, etc, were attracting very little of attention… However, we did not get disappointed, nor changed our plans.
Less than 10 months later, the month of December finds us discussing with several organizations and clients about automatic 6MWT (6 Minute Walk Test), gait control, context extraction through the smartphone, AI-based predictions, behavioral clustering; not to mention Covid-19 related needs, like contact tracing, risk assessment, PCR planning, vaccination symptom tracking, etc.
WTF happened during these months? You know the answer. Covid-19 has pushed the boundaries in several industries that are now trying to adopt new technologies and survive. In our case, it has been the strong belief that we should demonstrated our R&D excellence and not go with the flow. We felt uncomfortable already once, when we had to quit (or postpone) our efforts to commercially deploy an advanced eHealth solution, because the healthcare sector and the regulatory framework were not mature enough to support it. We have pivoted to Clinical Research domain to confirm the fact that simple solutions that work and comply with Good Clinical Practice (GCP) regulations, can become profitable solutions. We liked the outcome, which has rewarded us for our hard work, but we were not very happy to have a ‘commodity’ solution. We are an R&D driven startup and we aim to make solutions with impact. With this in mind, we did not interpret the Amsterdam message in the sense that the are addressing non-existing industry needs; we have rather bet that these will be soon become “unmet needs” of the same industry. It was a bold move for a startup company like us, to continue investigating ways to go beyond the trivial capturing of data, instead of focusing our few resources towards strengthening the sales of our solution, an ePRO (electronic Patient Reported Outcomes) of no-technological challenge. I remember discussions with my team, telling me that we need a miracle to have sponsors embracing SaaS solutions (or like I was writing in earlier posts “CRaaS — Clinical Research as a Service” solutions). There was no miracle in 2020, as this is normally a word with a good co-notation. Instead we had an Armageddon that has proven how critical it is to use best-of-breed of the technological advancements.
You may think that this article is to advertise Healthentia… No, it is not. It is to disseminate that you have to make bold moves and your will be rewarded for them. In the end of 2020, we had our annual event, the #Sprint4 workshop, this year with the topic “Bridging the silos between Clinical Research, eHealth & Digital Therapeutics — The rise of patient-centric applications” and I am so glad that we had CEOs of top companies from around the world that are embracing technology to make world a better place, or to “make Healthcare Great again” 😂 (as a good friend and iSprinter says). All these companies have made bold moves too, in fact so bold that they have raised hundreds of millions in the past year.
This brings me to the end of the story, which for Healthentia is the legacy of 2020 in the light of a very challenging and critical year. We claim to be able to predict clinical outcomes when processing lots of RWD, but we cannot predict our own success or growth. Success and growth require hard work, patience, enthusiasm, strength, lots of sprinting and fortune. Fortune favors the bold and we will keep on making bold moves for a paradigm shift in this domain. If this will be successful, we will only know in a few years, but we already know that we are happy with what we do and we are passionate for that. And that is bold.
My warmest wishes for a Happy and Prosperous New Year with good Health, Happiness and Bold moves.
