The Blue Team

CHAPTER 10. Exploring Berlin

I book my hotels online, my train or plane ticket and reserve my restaurant table online – so why not my doctor’s appointment too?” This is what Samedi is providing you – the ability to book your doctor’s appointment as easily as booking a hotel room. It could seem a simple effort but actually is a mammoth accomplishment. 

Samedi’s ‘magic’ software collects the medical information and optimizes the treatment process of all the parties involved in the medical cycle – patient’s previous illnesses, the various resources of the doctor’s office, the services that vary from health insurance to health insurance,  the possibility to refer a patient to a another doctor’s colleague – and facilitates the online patient coordination, scheduling, and collaboration of healthcare providers. The ultimate goal is to improve the quality of care for patients while ensuring maximum data security.

It makes the lives of us – the patients – easier as well as allows hospitals, clinics, health insurance and other medical providers to manage their workflows and resource planning without any additional hardware in order to achieve an optimized resource utilization.

What Covid-19 crisis showed us is that digitization of Healthcare must happen faster than we expected. Samedi saw that trend much sooner and now they are ready to lead the move! 

Thank you Samedi’s team for making us feel like home in your amazing office in Berlin and for all the insights on the future of integrated care, and a far better patient service and quality provision.

Our second interview was with Deutsche Bahn AG, the holding company of DB Schencker, one if the largest logistics companies in the world which transports almost everything anywhere. We met with INSEAD Alumni and VC investor Daniel Paz who has an experience in supply chain management and innovation to get his insights on where startups can best tackle the problems in medical supply chains.

The discussion centered around problems we raised with visibility in the supply chain, and how difficult it is for a player down the stream to anticipate the problems coming towards them. Another problem was that currently information is not well distributed, and therefore players cannot anticipate disruptions in time and redistribute resources accordingly.

He sees great potential for companies working on item level tracking that would digitise production floors and warehouses connecting stock levels more accurately to SAP. Daniel also listed other techniques for estimating global stock levels such as satellite imaging of infrastructure occupancy as indirect technologies that could help feed digital twin overseeing supply chain performance.

We had a very inspiring discussion with Wilfried Pimenta, INSEAD GEMBA13 – the Business Development Director of the IOTA Foundation!

IOTA developed the Tangle, an open source public distributed ledger technology (DLT) hosted by a decentralised network enabling exchange of value and data openly and free of charge. It is different and potentially better than conventional public blockchains as it removes the need for miners and associated fees which jeopardize many IoT- and real time data streaming- related business models. It also builds on energy efficient algorithms and addresses Blockchain’s intrinsic scalability issues which many of IOTA’s industrial partners see as preconditions to the deployment of real world commercial applications.

How can IOTA impact the future of Healthcare? Managing patient data across a fast growing connected value chain and supply chain is an increasing challenge in eHealth. Handling securely personal data sharing across silos of organisations is a fundamental challenge as we’ve seen through the variety of contact tracing solutions introduced during the Covid19 crisis. Thanks to the Tangle and its new self-sovereign identity scheme, IOTA makes the sharing of personal data possible under the control of humans. This enables patient centric “smart” innovative services and unlocks the secure flow of personal information that real time monitoring and automatised processing require for value based care and reliable decision support systems. In B2B environments, the IOTA Tangle also provides a single source of truth which all parties can rely on in order to track and trace products along the whole supply chain. This allows greater transparency and cost efficiency across the whole health ecosystem especially where IoT and automation of trade and distribution are at play.

Thank you Wilfried, for all the insights on how to empower ourselves to better control and use our data and accelerate the digital transformation of the Health industry!”

More information can be found at https://www.iota.org/solutions/ehealth