Yossi Bahagon, CEO of Sweetch, has over 20 years of experience in digital health. He is a clinically active family physician, a special advisor for the World Health Organization, and the founder of several successful digital health start-ups, previously having founded & led the digital health division of the second largest health maintenance organization globally. Additionally, Yossi founded a venture fund dedicated to digital health.
Sweetch is a clinically validated platform that empowers patients to improve their health outcomes and quality of life by taking a more active role in managing their chronic condition.
By combining state-of-the-art Data and Behavioral Sciences, Sweetch’s proprietary Just-in-Time-Adaptive-Intervention (JITAI) technology converts millions of data points originating from the patient’s smartphone and other connected devices into hyper-personalized recommendations with the right tone, timing, and real-world context during every step of the individual’s unique health journey. Through real-time analysis of the patient’s current context and past behavior patterns, Sweetch automatically and continuously optimizes the stimuli recommendations that each user receives, creating a meaningful and sustainable impact on patient compliance and engagement across various dimensions of chronic disease management.
Sweetch has presented outstanding clinical, patient-satisfaction, and ROI outcomes in both clinical trials and Real-World Evidence setups and has established strategic partnerships with tier-1 global pharma, medical device, insurers, and healthcare provider entities across the US, EU, and Latam.
I have been a practicing family physician for many years which allowed me to see things from my patients’ point of view, understand their needs and the challenges they face and, ultimately, acknowledge the gaps in the healthcare system. One of the main challenges that I witnessed was the lack of patient adherence. My patients were struggling to keep up with their healthcare regimens, which led me to notice a missing element between medical teams and patients. Even if you prescribe the most accurate and effective intervention for your patient, it simply won’t matter if they don’t follow your recommendation. There can be billions of dollars and ten years of research invested in a certain treatment, but it will never work if the patient doesn’t comply. The need for a system to help patients adhere to their treatment regimens became very evident. I co-founded Sweetch with this purpose in mind, to shed a light on the most important issues at hand, support patients throughout their journey every step of the way and offer a trusted voice that understands their needs and what drives them to action.
Sweetch takes data and turns it into actions — in this case, patient recommendations. Sweetch adds behavioral data into the mix of existing clinical, biometric and omic data, and uses that to personalize its touch points with patients to increase the likelihood of action.
The type of data we’re using are simple things such as when the user arrived and left home, travelled to work or the office, entered a restaurant, started walking or running and many other points. Each of these small data points creates a ‘persona’ to classify the user such as a night owl or long commuter etc. Over time we can create daily and weekly summaries and compare individual days of the week to build behavior patterns and understand, for example, how a weekday compares to a weekend.
This big picture allows us to send a message to a user saying ‘Good Evening, it’s getting close to your bedtime’. We know this because we have monitored the user’s sleeping patterns and know what time they typically go to bed. Using this information, we can make an appropriate recommendation to the user e.g., taking their medication.
Over time, the system, using its Reinforcement Learning algorithms, will improve the quality of messages it is sending.
Sweetch is HIPAA and GDPR complaint and adheres to regulations regarding data collection and usage in all the markets it operates in.
Patient trust is a critical issue today which has a significant impact on adherence. Around 40% of patients with prescribed medication do not adhere to their medication. This means that somewhere along the way between a doctor prescribing the medication and the patient complying with the recommendation, something goes wrong. Improving clinical outcomes requires overcoming this “last mile problem” involving patient behavior.
Sweetch’s holistic and personalized approach empowers patients to take a more active role in managing their care. On one hand, we increase patients’ trust, improve their health outcomes, and overall satisfaction. On the other hand, this improved commitment to care strengthens and accelerates our pharma partners’ ability to achieve their business KPIs, creating a true win-win for both.
One of the key challenges facing digital therapeutics today is adoption on the physician, medical team, and patient fronts.
To resolve this, we need to invest in education not only at the beginning when onboarding but throughout the patient’s usage of the product. This education is important for ensuring that physicians, medical teams, and patients understand the long-term effects of the treatment and can realize the outcomes. Education efforts must be supported by high-quality evidence — Randomized Controlled Trials alongside real-world evidence.
An additional challenge the industry faces is privacy. Many digital therapeutics today collect patient data for improving algorithms or identifying areas for product improvement and development. Privacy is an issue at the top of the agenda for most consumers today and is especially important when it comes to sensitive information about people’s health. Privacy concerns about a product can prevent digital therapeutic companies from reaching their target audiences in an effective way
It’s vital that startups in the digital therapeutics industry take the time to meet local regulatory requirements for privacy in every market prior to launch. This needs effective communication with physicians, medical team members, patients, and pharma companies. In addition, working through trusted partners and associations is an extra way to show your trustworthiness to patients.
The advancement of technology in the past couple of decades has enabled the growth in remote health, while the past few years of the pandemic have seen its rapid development, expansion, and deployment. Remote healthcare and remote patient monitoring is becoming a commodity care pathway and is continuously making progress toward improving patient outcomes in many ways.
By granting regular oversight of key patient health metrics such as blood pressure, weight, and glucose levels, physicians can paint a clearer picture of their patient’s current health and challenges, and move from just-in-case follow-up to proactive just-in-time follow-up, adjusting the response to treatment and preventing many health issues before they happen.
This is especially critical for patients in low-access or remote areas who may have greater difficulty seeing their physician, as well as patients with chronic conditions who need more regular touchpoints in the doctor-patient relationship.
It’s also worth remembering that the less time physicians have to spend taking blood pressure or weight measurements in person at their clinic, the more time they have to deal with patients needing in-person care or facing critical issues. So, everyone, not just patients signed up to remote monitoring platforms will benefit.
Sweetch turns data into actionable insights on both the patient and medical team fronts. Sweetch’s management dashboard enables care teams to view their overall patient engagement level, as well as specific engagement and clinical data of choice, at the individual level. The system also proactively identifies those patients who need more high-touch support. The proactive and focused engagement and outcomes map that Sweetch provides allows physicians and other medical team members to be more hands-on with tweaking or altering a patient’s treatment plan and optimizing it for better patient outcomes.
I love this question because it’s so ingrained in my philosophy and our culture at Sweetch. For me, my executive colleagues, and my team, healthcare and digital health are ALL about impact and the effect we can have on patients’ lives. Becoming the patient’s trusted voice, being THE touchpoint of various healthcare players in their interface with the people they serve has the potential to significantly impact the lives and quality-of-life of hundreds of millions of patients, and this is the language that is ingrained in the company culture. When I interview new employees, I want to hear this value loud and clear, it’s not just about seeking KPIs and increasing revenue cycles. This value of ‘doing well and doing good’ is essential not just for enjoying work, but succeeding.
I see Sweetch as THE touchpoint layer between various health stakeholders — pharma and medical device companies, pharmacies, providers, and insurers — and the people they serve. Sweetch’s expertise is personalized, cost-effective, sustainable, and scalable patient activation via a unique approach that combines data and behavioral science, and we do it with proven outstanding success. We aim to be THE patient trusted voice, improving health outcomes and quality-of-life, while, at the same time, accelerating our partners’ business KPIs. Our dream is to support every patient with a chronic condition to not only manage their condition but feel like they have a supportive partner in reaching their health goals.
Given challenging economic conditions, the digital health market will become much more selective regarding value, evidence, product-market fit, and business models. That being said, the digital health and digital therapeutics train already left the station, and their revolutionary promise and impact on patients’ empowerment is already a fact that will accelerate — regardless of tough market conditions.
We should expect to see an evolution in patient care to a more agile, mobile model of care management. Physicians will combine in-person periodic visits with multimodal touchpoints between visits to deliver care wherever the patient is. This new model of care will utilize various innovative health technologies including apps, wearables, telehealth, and more. I further anticipate the integration of the patient’s “life print” into care models and treatment plans. This includes the consideration of habits, intrinsic motivations, capabilities, and availabilities in forming clinical recommendations, ensuring that compliance is realistic for every individual.
In addition, we will see more data collection tools implemented in patients’ daily lives fueling the growth of AI and ML tools that will process and analyze data producing great insights, improved care recommendations, and ultimately better patient outcomes.
Healthcare players that won’t integrate digital companions with their physical products will be left behind — “if you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less”.
Join Dr. Yossi Bahagon at the HealthTechX Summit in London on 23rd February to hear his perspectives on the use of technology to improve outcomes. See the full agenda here.