Ira Pastor, ideaXme longevity and aging ambassador and founder of Bioquark interviews Dr. Oliver Harrison, CEO Telefónica, Alpha Health.
Find the video interview here
Ira Pastor comments:
The year is now 2019 and we have surpassed $7 trillion in total annual healthcare expenditures around the globe. We’re spending close to a $1 trillion a year on pharmaceutical products and hundreds of billions on diagnostics.
As an industry, the health sector spends annually an additional $200 billion globally on new life science research and development.
Companies creating digital medicine
Many more organisations are joining the health space in 2019. From a U.S. centric perspective, it is no longer just HMOs like United Healthcare, or Pharma companies like Merck, or device companies like Medtronic that are driving the sector.
In the last couple of years alone, big tech companies such Apple, Amazon, Uber, and Google have all made major strategic moves into health care, with the goal of using their Silicon Valley honed skills and huge piles of cash to try and disrupt the industry with “moonshot” thinking. From healthcare administration to formation of actual clinics to anti-aging drug development, smart blood sugar sensing contact lenses, and genetic modification of super-mosquitos, the interests of these companies are quite diverse from their core businesses.
Medical Moonshots
Not all moonshot activity originates from the USA. Telefónica, is one of the largest telephone operators and mobile network providers in the world and is headquartered in Madrid, Spain. This Spanish multinational telecommunications company generates $52 billion in revenue per year.
In 2016 Telefónica set up Telefónica Alpha, an innovation facility based in Barcelona, created to address some of the biggest problems in society by conceiving and delivering radical solutions and breakthrough technology. These Moonshots are multi-year development projects that address big societal problems. The goal is for these organisations to evolve into successful stand alone business models.
Innovator creating digital medical moonshots at Telefónica
Today’s guest is Dr. Oliver Harrison, CEO of the health moonshot group Telefónica Alpha Health. Dr. Harrison has a medical degree from Cambridge (specialty in Neuroscience) and has a MPH from Johns Hopkins. He has served in various executive level roles, including at McKinsey healthcare, where he spent several years as Head of Public Health and then was Director of Strategy at Health Authority, Abu Dhabi. He was senior consultant to the WHO and Senior Commercial Advisor at Guy’s and St Thomas Hospital, one of the largest hospital trusts in the UK.
On the show Oliver discusses:
His background, how he became interested in science and medicine, and how he ended up at this very unique convergent epicenter of tech and health.
The reasons why big-tech is making these “Moonshots” at this particular time.
About the Alpha Health moonshot, Perspectives, an app to counteract body dysmorphic disorder and its presentation to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the approval of commercial use.
About their Moonshot app to treat alcoholism, which affects 14 million people in the U.S. alone, based on a medical therapy technique called attention training.
He will talk about the importance of guarding bioethics as part of the process of providing digital medicine.
Towards the end of the interview you will hear who Oliver would like to meet and what he would like to talk with this person about.
Also, find this interview in audio format on iTunes, SoundCloud, TuneIn Radio, Radio Public, Spotify and in video format on YouTube.
Twitter:
Find out more: Alpha Company
Credits: Ira Pastor interview video, text, and audio.
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If you enjoyed this interview, you may also like Ira Pastor’s interview WAR on Cancer with Dario Altieri CEO Wister Institute.
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