Icelandic firm Sidekick Health is on a mission to harness digital health advances to enable personalised care at scale, as HT World reports.
In healthcare today, many patients are treated with a one-size fits-all approach and treatment is most often given after the fact rather than being preventative. However, a significant amount of patients live with multiple conditions that need a personalised approach to their care.
Equally, many people do not have equitable access to healthcare, leaving many in need of solutions.
Sidekick Health is aiming to transform healthcare by utilising technology to provide multi-condition management and personalised care, as well to improve access to care for patients.
The firm currently works with five of the world’s twenty largest healthcare companies, with products prescribed on a regular basis by over 13,000 physicians. Within the US payer landscape, the company is collaborating with one of the largest health insurers, and partners include Medicare, Medicaid and employer populations across the country. In the pharmaceutical sector, it has strategic partnerships with Eli Lilly, Pfizer and others, with multiple partnerships across the US and Europe.
The latest steps in its expansion include the acquisition of Germany-based aidhere, a developer of prescription digital therapeutics, and its more recent acquisition in June of PINK!, a digital health company specialising in cancer support and women’s health.
Its acquisition of aidhere has bolstered Sidekick Health’s services with its expertise in highly-regulated PDTs, while the PINK! acquisition offers expansion opportunities in women’s health and oncology.
Speaking to HT World at an innovation event in Reykjavík, CEO and co-founder of Sidekick Health, Dr. Tryggvi Thorgeirsson says that through providing digitised care management of chronic conditions and offering a platform covering multiple therapies, the company is aiming to improve clinical outcomes and reduce hospital visits.
“What we do is we digitise care management,” he says. “If you have a chronic condition, we work with three different approaches.
“We work with pharma companies, where we augment their pharmacotherapy. If a drug is prescribed for a condition, we augment that with our digital therapy, meaning if patients are getting a drug for breast cancer, we provide a breast cancer programme to help address the things that the drug might not help like anxiety, nausea, pain, and mental health.
“Secondly, we work with health insurers. For example, we work with the biggest health insurance company in the US that covers almost 50 million Americans.
“They use us to power their platform to digitise care management and disease management. So, if a patient has cancer or high risk pregnancy or Crohn’s disease, they offer a care management programme, which is digitised to our platform.
Thorgeirsson explains that patients are remotely connected with a care manager who helps them navigate their care and can pick up early signs of when things are going off track.
“It helps patients self manage everything to have better outcomes. We’re seeing fantastic outcomes, we’re seeing reduced ER visits, reduced hospitalisations and improved clinical outcomes, as well as member satisfaction,” says Thorgeirsson.
“We’ve built out over 20 different therapies or treatments for conditions that we can cover such as cardiovascular, metabolic, inflammation, maternity, and women’s health. That means that a patient doesn’t have to have two or three different apps, they have one platform. That’s why many of our clients are choosing us.
Thorgeirsson highlights how Iceland has created a fertile ground for innovation, supporting the development of Sidekick Health, and that the plans are now to reach a global market, having already expanded into the German and US markets.
“Last year we acquired a company in the German DECA market. A few years ago, the German Health Minister decided to create an infrastructure where you can treat digital therapy just like you treat pharmacotherapy,” explains Thorgeirsson.
“So, if you have digital therapy, and you have robust clinical studies to show that it works, then it gets approved as a medical device. And, if it’s approved and listed as a therapy, then doctors can prescribe it and every health insurer has to reimburse it. So last year, we bought the biggest company in that market and we now have 13,000 German doctors that are prescribing our therapies.
“Now our biggest team is in Germany, with the second biggest here in Iceland, but also a very big team in the US. So, the US and Europe are the biggest markets and Iceland is really our R&D hub.
“It’s a fantastic test market for research and development because we have one of the best healthcare systems in the world by quality metrics, it’s really well performing with great health registries. We can trace back diagnoses and we can easily track patients through a unique ID number that everyone has here. So, to do high quality clinical research very efficiently is great.”
While the uptake of digital therapies has increased since the Covid-19 pandemic, Thorgeirsson predicts that healthcare will see further adoption of digital technologies over the next three to five years.
“I think the main thing for everyone in our space is understanding how we can help accelerate the adoption of technology. We realise it takes, on average, 17 years for innovation to get to the patient’s bed,” says Thorgeirsson.
“I definitely think within three to five years, it’s going to be mainstream. We are going to look back and think, how were we able to run healthcare without this?”
