3 leaders on how they’re creating a healthcare ecosystem

Originally published by Olive in January 2022

Creating an ecosystem in healthcare will lead to improved outcomes and experiences for every human interacting with the system. But ecosystems don’t just come together overnight.

At HLTH 2021, a conference that brings together the healthcare ecosystem to focus on innovation, we asked three industry leaders what they’re doing to create a healthcare ecosystem. Here is what they shared.

1. Fostering an exchange of ideas. (Note: Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.)

“I co-founded the med-tech club on Clubhouse in the early days of that social audio platform to try to bring together people from different backgrounds, disciplines, geographies and generations. (The club aimed) to understand what mutual challenges we were facing, what learnings one could take from digital therapeutics and apply to medical devices for example, and how we can learn from the experiences of founders, leaders, executives, managers, individual contributors and apply these insights to our own day-to-day. (We hosted a) concentrated series of different events, talks, networking sessions and more on that platform and we hope to continue it.”

- Henry Peck, director of global marketing at Altoida

3. Putting the patient at the center.

“I consider myself to be an advocate, champion and disruptor in health equity. Health equity, to me, cuts across the entire ecosystem. Any company that is in healthcare and thinking about health should be thinking about equity because our country demands it. We are changing our demographics. We have an understanding that there has been haves and have-nots when it comes to health, and that is just absolutely unacceptable. So if you’re part of the ecosystem moving forward, you have to be concerned about equity. And that’s the role I have to play in that equation.”

- Duane Reynolds, founder and CEO of Just Health Collective

“One of the things we believe firmly is: It’s the patient who is going to make the change. Our focus as a company is helping the patient. If you focus on the patient and your customer focuses on the patient, that’s the winning combination. There’s a lot of focus on other parts of the delivery system that are important, but at the end of the day, the consumer is the patient, and we really believe in meeting them where they are. Sometimes that’s digitally, sometimes that’s on an analog basis on the telephone. Everyone is different. We need to say listen, we have multiple avenues to allow someone to get care — that to me is about understanding first and foremost where your customer is coming from and what their needs are.”

- Dr. Adam Silverman, M.D., chief medical officer of Syllable