EKMH Innovators Interview Series
An interview series spotlighting global tech influencers, disruptors, visionaries, and of course, innovators.
Telehealth is increasing playing a leading role in health innovation. According to EHealth Industry and Insurtech Expert Paolo Meciani, “The coronavirus has strongly revamped telehealth all over the world. During the Coronavirus crisis, also most health insurers made telehealth services available to a wider number of clients. Telehealth, also well before the Coronavirus crisis, was revolutionizing the healthcare industry with many applications for prevention, patient management, and monitoring.”
In his current role as the Founder of BIME Consulting and AssoFintech Insurtech Coordinatore, Meciani guides clients to adopt new paradigms and business models with the aim of both preventing people from becoming sick and healing people if they become sick. As an experienced digital healthcare and insurance innovator, his expertise stems from extensive international work experience within the insurance, health and pharmaceutical industries as well as past jobs wherein he successfully consulted leading multi-national companies in both national and global projects.
The coronavirus has undeniably accelerated the adoption of telehealth solutions; insurers can also now more easily leverage telehealth as a part of a broader digital health transformation. But what is telehealth? The World Health Organization (WHO) defines telehealth as the delivery of health care services, where patients and providers are separated by distance. Telehealth uses ICT for the exchange of information for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases and injuries, research and evaluation, and for the continuing education of health professionals.
Meciani explains further in a recent Fintastico article, “Terms telehealth and telemedicine are often used in different ways. There are many definitions of these terms, but according to literature and the most common practice in business, we refer to telehealth as a more generic term that refers to health in general: clinical and non-clinical applications. Telemedicine is related more to treating people from distance: therefore, clinical and patient care applications... telemedicine is a subset of telehealth.”
In this week’s interview I connected with Meciani via email to learn more about his expertise within the healthcare ecosystem, insurtech trends, ehealth industry innovations, building an effective team, and perhaps the most entertaining answer ever, advice (and absolute no-nos) for leading virtual conferences. Our interview follows.
EKMH: You recently published “Telehealth’s Role in Digital Health” on Fintastico. The coronavirus has accelerated the adoption of telehealth solutions. Insurers can now leverage telehealth as a part of a broader digital health transformation. How will these innovations transform the health industry?
Paolo Meciani: The health industry must move away from thinking about curing people who already sick to preventing people from becoming ill, or, in case of sickness, to manage the patient in the best way according to her or his needs that are not always aligned with stakeholders’ and caregivers’ goals.
Telehealth has a connection role in this fascinating transformation. I think of telehealth as a motorway network, ideally accessible to everyone, both healthy and sick people who are connected to all the entities that look after our health and wellbeing. Physicians, hospitals, insurers, pharmacies, nutritionists, as well as home health devices and intelligent databases should be connected via the motorway. A pervasive connection within the health ecosystem lays the foundation for a more preventive and highly personalized health system.
EKMH: Who benefits most from telehealth innovations? Do you have pushback from doctors or patients? How has malpractice insurance entered the equation?
Paolo Meciani: Clients should always be at the heart of a telehealth exercise. Healthcare becomes personalized, domestic, timely, preventive. As a result, we have many advantages as there are fewer hospitalizations and less travel for doctor visits.
Telehealth also means efficiency: we can achieve better results with less resources. For example, it is possible to monitor data of a high number of patients with limited patient-doctor interaction. This means that a great economic advantage can be ripe for care providers. This economic advantage is given by the fact that telehealth users are doing a lot of small activities previously performed by doctors and nurses (such as blood pressure measurement).
Technology grants great user experience, and at the same time, shifts some manual activity that cannot be automated down to the bottom of the value chain: to the final user. The same already happened with flight self-check in and with supermarket self-check out; in the healthcare industry, we will see the same shift, along with digital health adoption progression.
A satisfied user with a great experience doesn’t mind performing some activities previously managed by the caregiver; on the other hand, the caregiver adoption shouldn’t be taken for granted. Caregivers also need easy to use solutions and to provide effective solutions we need, and, with reference to the motorway network, all the bridges in place. The lack of bridges that connect all available data and actors is the biggest hurdle we are facing today in the industry: information is spread in a multitude of places. If we only think about how many different places our personal health data can be stored, we can understand that we are missing the opportunity to be cured with the best knowledge available about our health.
The concern is shifting from insurance malpractice to security. Healthcare data breaches is a growing concern: over 90% of US healthcare providers have reported a data breach over the past five years. Protected Health Information can be stolen and sold, as cam patient medical data, treatments and pharmaceutical therapies.
EKMH: What other paradigms and innovations do you expect and hope to see in the ehealth industry within the next year or two?
Paolo Meciani: The gap between available digital health solutions and their effective implementation at large scale is huge. We have reliable ehealth solutions that could provide enormous benefits, if implemented in either public or private health systems. To me, what should happen is a matter of leadership in healthcare.
I’ll try to explain it from different perspectives. If you think about health at national level (imagine a European country or a US State) there is no public discussion about health. Ever heard a prime minister talking about health target objectives and results achieved? Here in Italy (where I live), for example, we have more than 10 million people affected by hypertension, but there is no leadership at a country level to address the issue. Do we judge the Ministry of Health also on the impact of an illness, as hypertension, on the citizens? Ever heard of a Ministry of Health resignation as the health of his or her citizens is not improved as expected?
There are public discussions on road death accidents and on deaths at work, but little about health. In public and private health organizations and in insurance companies the health agenda is much too focused on economic topics.
Only the Coronavirus crisis, with its high impact on society, forced the assumption of leadership with regards of healthcare; during the crisis, healthcare performance has been publicly discussed by leaders, and who was accountable for our healthcare became clear to all of us.
The new healthcare paradigm is founded by the “measurement of health”: we need to measure to prevent and to stay healthy. Via the motorway network, we must provide all relevant measured data to our caregivers. The measurement of several health parameters allows us to understand who is accountable for our health; with a new paradigm based on health measurement, the first person to become accountable for our health is ourselves.
EKMH: As a keynote speaker, what advice do you have for addressing virtual or live conference sessions for the first time? And for levity, what are some absolute no-nos?
Paolo Meciani: I am fascinated by the opportunities brought by virtual and live conference sessions; virtual sessions are an unprecedented opportunity for knowledge and competence to emerge. People with knowledge and expertise can emerge in contrast to people with less valuable content and ideas.
In fact, in virtual sessions catching and maintaining attention is much harder than in face to face meetings; because we miss eye contact, body language and voice nuances are less effective. That is why competence matters more.
We all have participated in a number of video sessions, and very often participants could have had valuable content, but the format was not well-conceived. To start on the right foot in a virtual meeting I suggest avoiding three things:
Framing from bottom to top; leave it to dictators.
To forget about the importance of lighting; leave the darkness to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”
To forget that first impression matters; in virtual conferences, you also never get a second chance to make a first impression: ever seen parents bullied by their kids? Or messy library shelves in the background to show off alleged knowledge? Leave special effects to show business.
In other words: the more sober, the better.
EKMH: As a former team management consultant, what’s your recipe for building and leading effective teams?
Paolo Meciani: To share a truly common goal is the fundamental ingredient for an effective team. For example, if we work on a telehealth project, the goal cannot be the design and implementation of new technologies and new processes; we have to think at a measurable impact on people’s health. We must think at the people with Type 2 Diabetes, with hypertension, etc., to whom we will provide dedicated services. A proper goal leads our thoughts and a reinforced energy towards what it really matters.
When we work on health innovation, we must cover a variety of topics, as clinical health, prevention, behavioural science, software, artificial intelligence, data architecture, privacy, and security. A variety of competencies are needed to succeed; an effective team should have heterogeneous knowledge and expertise. In this environment, a seasoned project manager should allow some outstanding team members to temporarily take the lead when appropriate.
EKMH: When do you prefer to work solo versus work on a team? What personal qualities have enabled you to lead and collaborate well?
Paolo Meciani: I never work solo to solve a problem. I could perform some limited tasks on my own, but I need to share my thoughts and my knowledge, therefore I always look for collaboration, no matter if I am leading a major project or I am doing a small assignment.
While collaborating with other people I experienced that the most important thing to do is to listen and to ask; the more we know, the more we are able to ask insightful questions, which lead us towards a natural leadership role.
EKMH: Many consider an engineering degree to be the optimal educational background. How have your engineering degrees helped and continue to help you in your career?
Paolo Meciani: Absolutely! To me, the engineering degree, mechanical in my case, helped me to learn new things along my career path. The theoretical and methodological basis I gained as an engineer are invaluable for a subsequent continuous learning. At the same time, I believe that engineering is strictly related to make things happen, to put theory into practice. An engineer can bring the attitude to realize things, also if the task is outside the professional comfort zone.
EKMH: Finally, which books, podcasts and/or films sustained you during the quarantine? Which books do you plan to read this summer?
Paolo Meciani: I will never forget the quarantine when I spent a lot of time reading. Every single early morning walking up and down from the kitchen to the sitting room, I spent a couple of hours reading business books (The Digital Health Revolution by Kevin Pereau; Health and Wellness Measurement Approaches for Mobile Healthcare by Gita Khalili Moghaddam and Christopher R. Lowe). Away from business, I enjoyed reading Homeland by Fernando Aramburu.
In the evening something different: with my son I saw Michael Jordan’s “The Last Dance”, and the “The Good Place” with my daughter. The only one not affected at all by the quarantine was my dog, Tammy.
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