MUNICH, GERMANY. Feb 03, 2022. Startup Creasphere celebrates EXPO 7 showcasing 7 successful pilot projects between the corporate partners Roche and BIOTRONIK and Batch 7 startups. 

Three hours packed with insights and success stories on how corporates and startups are transforming healthcare together: The virtual EXPO 7 on February 3 was an impressive demonstration of how powerful co-creation between established global players and innovative digital health startups can be. The agenda offered a mix of panel discussions on pilot best practices, a keynote on the huge potential of real-world evidence in healthcare, and of course the pitches by the startups and their pilot owners from Roche and Biotronik presenting the results of the four months collaboration. 

Panel – Pilot Best Practices in Digital Health

The event kicked off with a panel discussion with former pilot owners from Roche, BIOTRONIK and Novo Nordisk on best practices for corporate-startup collaborations. All three speakers agreed on a major key success factor for pilot projects: have a clear vision of what you want to achieve within the exploration phase and define the assessment criteria for follow-up activities up-front. 

BIOTRONIK – Pilot Showcases

After the panel, the focus of the event was put directly on the first pilot showcases. Dr. Volker Lang, Senior Vice President R&D for Cardiac Rhythm Management at BIOTRONIK, introduced the company’s collaborations with Batch 7 startups through the Startup Creasphere program.

Following the first round of startup pitches presented by BIOTRONIK, Axel Heitmueller, Managing Director of Imperial College Health Partners in London, entered the stage. In his inspiring keynote speech, he talked about the potential of real-world evidence and how it can contribute to the health of patients worldwide.

Keynote ‘Real world experience of working with real word data’ – Key Learnings:

1. Need for real-world evidence, holistic population representation, and inclusivity in trials to prevent biased results and strengthen reliability through the testing continuum.
2. Real-world evidence is based on real-world data. It is important to increase model validation via the combination and correlation of different real-world data sources  – e.g. EHRs, patient-reported outcomes, claims data, non-health data.
3. Imperial Health Partners is part of the London healthcare system covering 2.5 Mio patients, managing a data warehouse holding one of the largest longitudinal data sets in Europe, connecting and integrating close-to-realtime data streams of hospitals, GPs, mental health, and social care.
4. Longitudinal Link data enables tracing of patients throughout the healthcare economy and interrogation of the end-to-end patient pathways.
5. Covid accelerated the integration of data siloes and kickstarted the nationwide approach of population health management by underlining the importance of data integration to tackle disease tracing, tracking, and coordination.
6. Longitudinal data integration enables new digital health models to be tested and validated in a real-world data scenario.
7. One of the most important elements to ensure public trust in the disclosure of data is establishing high data privacy and governance standards.
8. Interoperability is one of the key success factors when it comes to successfully introducing new digital innovation models in healthcare.

Novo Nordisk – Keynote

Next up, Matt Dugan, Director of the Business Innovation Garage at Novo Nordisk, shared his insights into the ambitious goals of Novo Nordisk, their innovation strategy and how they are currently building on the progress they’ve made to leverage digital and data, and ultimately to provide more value to the patients. Being an engaged partner within Startup Creasphere, they are exploring how they can move even faster by working with partners and to learn from the pilots in diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular diseases around the world.

Roche – Pilot Showcases

The startup pitches were complemented by a crisp presentation from Moritz Hartmann, Global Head Roche Information Solutions, who provided insights into the Roche vision on how to move from siloed healthcare data to increasingly connected systems through open innovation. He highlighted two Roche initiatives to which the Startup Creasphere program has made a substantial contribution: 

• cobas pulse: a point-of-care ecosystem based on a Roche device serving as a market place of solutions that includes medical apps from the three former Startup Creasphere participants SteadySense, Precordior, and S4DX
• a pre-pre-analytics ecosystem featuring the sample tracking solutions of two alumni, Deigma and S4DX

Startup Award

The Startups: