Tag: Health

If there is one industry that will be disrupted the most from the technological advancements that we can see today - it is healthcare. Today, it is inefficient, bureaucratic and capital-intensive, but most importantly, it is not oriented towards the patient and its personal needs. With the development of technologies, such as Gene Editing, Artificial Intelliigence, Robotics, Blockchain and Big Data, we can be certain, that healthcare of the future will be completely different than the one we know today. Delivering affordable and quality healthcare to almost 10 billion people on the planet by 2050 will probably turn out to be a huge problem for all of us. It will requre from both politicians and corporate leaders to define the boundaries of basic and luxury care, while tеchnolgy is transforming everything from prevention to diagnosis and treatment. The exponential changes in healthcare will be among the main topics of Webit.Festival Europe 2019 and its Health Summit.The third edition of the event will be chaired by prof. Shafi Ahmed - the most watched surgeon in the human history and world’s renown innovator in VR and AR. Personalization in medicine will continue to be among the most important trends in healthcare. It will make the care for the patient tailored to its unique needs, genetic makeup and lifestyle, which will immediately lead to better results for each and everyone of us. This new approach could reduce greatly the number of ineffective interventions, save the whole system lots of unnecessary cots and give us better outcomes. A recent study showed that using a genetic test on breast cancer patients for example reduces chemotherapy use by 34%. While personalized medicines have existed for almost two decades, advances in science and technology will make our diagnostics smarter and more targeted. This will help phisicians identify patients who may be eligable for appropriate treatment options. The importance of personalized medicine has been captured very well by the former US president Barack Obama. During his last days in office, he stated that it will give us the greatest opportunities for new medical breakthroughs that we have ever seen. “Doctors have always recognized that every patient is unique, and doctors have always tried to tailor their treatments as best they can to individuals. You can match a blood transfusion to a blood type. That was an important discovery. What if matching a cancer cure to our genetic code was just as easy, just as standard? What if figuring out the right dose of medicine was as simple as taking our temperature”, he asked. With current treatments, patients are treated with a one-size-fits-all approach and if the therapy is not effective another therapy is attempted. Personalized medicine or precision medicine aims to change this paradigm by finding diagnostic markers (in terms of DNA, RNA, proteins or metabolites) that can predict therapy response. Come to Webit.Festival Europe and learn about the future healthcare and what steps need to me made in order to turn its use towards the single patient. During Health Summit you will get the chance to listen to top enterprise, science and policy leaders, such as the Former Director of Life Course and Ageing in WHO, Dr. John Beard, the Chair of Medicine in Singularity University, Daniel Kraft, the President of European Health Parliament, Joseph Elborn, the Cheif Medical Officer at IBM, Mark Davies, the CEO of Open Health Network, Tatyana Kanzaveli, the Managing Director for EMEA at IBM Watson Health, Mark O’Herlihy and many others. Here you can see a full list of the confirmed speakers at Webit.Festival, while here you can get all the information you need about the tickets for the event.

Join us at the 3rd edition of one of the world’s leading gatherings of top experts who shape the future of healthcare, pharma and wellness. Also known as Webit.Health Summit & Expo, hosted by Webit.Festival 2019. Join us to explore and experience the future of healthcare. Expand your horizon. Get inspired by exceptional ideas. Join the community of people who improve the state of wellbeing and change lives.

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Webit.Health Programme Commitee is chaired by Prof. Shafi Ahmed - the most watched surgeon in the human history and world’s renown innovator in VR/AR

Daniel Kraft Physician-Scientist. Chair for Medicine at Singularity University & Founder & Chair, Exponential Medicine		Ali Parsa CEO, Babylon
Joseph Elborn President, European Health Parliament		Junaid Bajwa Global Lead for Strategic Alliances, Digital Centre of Excellence at Merck & Co
Dan Vahdat Founder & CEO, Medopad		Anu Acharya CEO, Mapmygenome

Agenda, Impact and knowledge areas:

• AI
• VR/AR, Imaging
• Exponential Medicine
• Personalized Medicine
• Genomics and biotech
• Well-being and Longevity
• Marketing & Communication in healthcare

Who attends?

• Healthcare, pharma and biotech Innovators
• Founders and new disruptive healthcare, pharma and wellness entrepreneurs
• healthcare marketing agencies
• Investors
• Governments, Policy makers and regulators

Partners (sponsors and exhibitors)

Webit.Health is proud to be supported by some of the world leading industry innovators including:

Become a Partner

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World's Biggest Startup Challenge

Webit.Health is the place to meet the hottest startups and founders of health, biotech, pharma and wellbeing starups around the world! Over 4000 startups apply for the Webit.Foundation grants. A significant number of them are in the health domain. Join Webit to withness the future of healthcare. If you are founder/work for disruptive startups - apply below and get a free exhibition slot and opportunity to pitch at the Webit.Health Stage in front of the global leaders and investors. Stay tuned for the BIG winers of the Webit.Heath Awards in 2019. The winner of the special Webit.Health Awards 2018 was Prof. Shafi Ahmed, the 2019 Chair of Webit.Health Programme Committee and global role model for and innovators. See more information here See you at Webit.Festival Europe over 13-15 May 2019 in Sofia. Warm regards, The Webit Team

Health is so important to all of us, it requires change. How do we create a better future for all of us?

In healthcare around the world there's change in quality, sometimes poor access. How do we enable technology to deliver the things that we all aspire? - to make healthcare free for all at a high quality. That's the role of Health.Summit chaired by prof. Shafi Ahmed. Medicine is the perfect example of how the fourth industrial revolution is changing all of us.

What about Europe?

We need data and insights on the health of European citizens, on how we organize care, and on how much our health systems cost. The EC joined forces with the OECD and the Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, and analyzed each EU country. The reports show that our healthcare needs to be more effective, accessible and resilient. For example, 80% of healthcare costs are spent on treating chronic diseases, but just a fraction on prevention. Shifting on prevention not only tackles inequalities in health and quality of life, but also offers an enormous economic return. Today, one in four patients have no access to a family doctor or a local health center, and have to go to an emergency department. With available and affordable primary care we can avoid unnecessary hospital admissions. Too often patients are searching for the best possible treatment in a maze of scattered health services. Integrated care, where all care providers work more closely together delivers better results for patients. "The state of Health" in the EU links the strengths and challenges in the different European countries to common health priorities across the EU. The reports help policymakers make relevant and efficient choices so all of us can enjoy a healthy future.

Teaching tens of thousands of people together to improve the education resources.

As a global surgeon prof. Shafi Ahmed thinks about how to scale the learning and education around the world. Now we are connected with cables, by phones and satellites. And because we are connected now we can reach far more. We have social media to connect with people.  We are changing the paradigm of the doctor-patient relationship using AI, chat bots, deep machine learning, avatars and holograms. In the next 2-5 years we are going to communicate in a different way. The human interaction will little bit disappear because it is too expensive.

I thought "How can I connect with people around the world? Let's connect my avatar with other avatars in America, in India. Can they come to my theater together in this virtual space? They call me the Virtual Surgeon.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4T49_zz3HA[/embed]

Imagine someone operating on the other side of the globe, calling you and saying: "I need some advice, can you come?" Plane travel - too long, inefficient. What about transporting yourself as a hologram?

Shafi Ahmed has been spending a lot of time talking about how we use technologies in a way that we haven't done before. And at Webit.Festival Europe 2018 he announced that he and Mr. Martin Dockweiler are launching the first digital hospital in South America. The hospital will be called SAMD (Shafi Ahmed Martin Dockweiler) University Hospital. It will have a center of innovation, research, teaching. They will be testing new technologies.

The future is not today or tomorrow. It's happening all around us as we speak. And that is the future we create for ourselves.  

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Missed the 2018 edition of Webit.Festival Europe? Don’t miss the 2019! Get your super early bird 2in1 tickets – 2 for the price of 1 here!

“The main and huge problem in healthcare is data. Big data and big amounts of it. You can’t start creating huge clinical data warehouses anymore. The amount of data is simply exploding.”

In case you’re wondering who Gutenberg is, he is the guy who invented the printing press and thus changed everything back in the times by starting the Printing Revolution. Now healthcare is at the doorstep of a suchlike event. Dr. Clemens Suter-Crazzolara, VP of Product Management for Health & Precision Medicine at SAP gave a keynote at Webit.Festival in Sofia about what are people and companies already doing with the help of technology in order to improve patients’ and doctors’  health experience and the treatment of patients. The main and huge problem in healthcare is data. Big data, and big amounts of it. If we walk in any given hospital, we inevitably notice that lots of the data we provide or data already collected, is taken on notes, sheets or some format of paper. Other industries are moving to digitalization with rocket speed but in healthcare it is not happening and this process is still somehow a struggle. Privacy, security and access to the correct data are all difficulties underlying ahead of healthcare in its process of adapting to digitalization. You can’t start creating huge clinical data warehouses anymore. The amount of data is simply exploding. You have to think of intelligent ways that the data stays in different locations, but for instance, you can send federated queries to those locations and then collect the needed answers. The use of mobile devices increases with each passing day. There are many apps which people use for consulting on their physical health, consulting with a physician online or simply googling their symptoms but the patient engagement is not fully tailored to both the patient and the physician. The need of a common platform that collects the experience and practices from physicians all around the world, as well as helping to collaborate and get information from one another and facilitating their day to day work is at the roots of change in the health system and that’s the thing SAP is trying to create. You can watch the keynote of Dr. Clemens Suter-Crazzolara here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwyLgKvCaBQ Physical and mental health, personal care and wellbeing are an ever growing theme in today’s everyday life. Recognizing it as an integrant area of value and interest, the Health & Wellbeing Summit at Webit.Festival Sofia 2018 will gather again top speakers from the industry, unveiling top tendencies and knowledge from their practice. Have a glance at last year’s Webit with some of our best photos and check our different ticket options here. [easingslider id="4954"]

Today, healthcare is inefficient, bureaucratic and expensive. It is a multi-trillion industry, that will be among the most transformed sectors over the next 10 years. Thousands of startups, along with giants, such as Google, IBM, Apple, Samsung and many others are entering the race to revolutionize the way we treat human diseases today. This will lead to much more sound, effective and cheap health care. To understand upcoming changes in the best possible way, we asked Prof. Shafi Ahmed a few questions about the future of Healthcare. He is among the most recognized visionaries in the world of medicine and one of the top-level speakers at Health & Wellbeing Summit - part of this year’s Webit.Festival Europe.

What do we need to change in our medical education system to answer the needs of tomorrow?

Medical teaching is still very traditional yet technology is advancing exponentially. We need to look at modern methods of teaching the digital doctors of tomorrow. With my company Medical Realities we are utilising augmented and virtual reality to add a different dimension in immersive learning. I have also introduced a new programme called Barts X for our medical students which teaches our students on innovation and entrepreneurship which is essential in creating future leaders.

You are known as a visionary. How do you imagine the medicine after ten years?

We are currently undergoing the 4th industrial revolution with the fusion of technologies like AR, VR, Robotics, AI, Big Data and the use of wearable technology which will radically change the doctor patient relationship and how we practise medicine. This is the most exciting time to be involved in medicine. When a patient asks for advice the first point of contact will be artificial intelligence rather than a doctor. The doctor’s role will undoubtedly change. A number of specialties like radiology and dermatology will be largely replaced by sophisticated AI. We will consult remotely using AR and VR and monitor our patients using a mixture of wearables, injectables and ingestible sensors. The cost of genomic profiling will be cheap and will allow us to deliver precision and personalised medicine.

What are the biggest medical threats to humanity?

The biggest threats are going to be new infectious diseases like the Ebola virus which can cause devastation quickly. The inequality of the provision of basic surgery globally will affect the well-being of 5 billion people.

How will technology improve our health and increase our life expectancy?

There is much interest in looking at ageing as a disease which will be modified with either medicine or a gene altering process allowing us to live longer.

What is the biggest technological breakthrough in medicine in recent years?

The unravelling of the complete human genome and reducing the cost of profiling to $1000. The discovery of the CRISPR - Cas9 gene editing which is currently the simplest, most versatile and precise method of genetic manipulation. Here you can see a full list of the confirmed speakers at Webit.Festival, while here you can get all the information you need about the tickets for the event.

The AI Health Tech subsidiary of Google, Deep Mind Health, is creating a system, based on the blockchain technology, to show how the company uses all the medical data that passes through its processors. The “Verifiable Data Audit” will allow hospitals, doctors and even patients to track their personal information in real-time and see if it has been changed or compromised. Deep Mind is trying to improve medical diagnosis with machine learning. But for developing those tools requires large amounts of confidential data. The company was already criticized, after gaining access to patient records for 1.6 million people in three London hospitals. With its new project, Deep Mind will try to win back some of the lost trust.

“Data can be a powerful force for social progress, helping our most important institutions to improve how they serve their communities. As cities, hospitals and transport systems find new ways to understand what people need from them, they’re unearthing opportunities to change how they work today and identifying existing ideas for the future”, the company’s Co-founder Mustafa Suleyman wrote in a blog post.

It is working in partnership with London’s Royal Free Hospital to develop kidney monitoring software called Streams, but critics still feel that data sharing can give Google too much power over the National Health System. According to Suleyman, data can only benefit society if it has society’s trust and confidence and that is the reason why auditability becomes an increasingly important virtue. He explained that any entry will record the fact that a particular piece of data has been used and also the reason why, for example a blood test was checked against the NHS national algorithm to detect possible acute kidney injury. The new systems are related to the bitcoin cryptocurrency and just like blockchain, the ledger will be append-only, so once a record of data use is added, it can’t be erased later. The ledger will also make it possible for third parties to verify that nobody has tampered with any of the entries. Meanwhile, Google announced a series of new tools to assist users with data preparation and integration, which will upgrade the power and agility of Google Cloud for business clients. The first released product is the new private beta of Google Cloud Dataprep. The tool is visualizing the data preparation, detecting anomalies and using machine learning to suggest data transformation that can improve the quality of information. To learn more about the latest trends in FinTech & Blockchain, Health Tech and Big Data & Cloud visit Webit.Festival Europe in Sofia on April 25 and 26. During the event you can listen to top level speakers, such as the Vice President for Cloud and Mobile Technology Strategy at IBM Jonas Jacobi, the Global Head of FinTech at ING Group Benoit Legrand and the Consultant Surgeon and Co-founder of Virtual Medics and Medical Realities Prof. Shafi Ahmed.

Sean Parker, the charismatic billionaire and former President of Facebook, hase a new mission. Cancerous tumors carry certain markers called neoantigens and Parker wants to use algorithms to find them in the search for a vaccine.  To do so, the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy will work with more than 30 public and private pharmaceutical, biotech, cancer research nonprofits and academic institutions through a partnership with the Cancer Research Institute to use predictive algorithms to help uncover new cancer neoantigens found coded in DNA. In other news, A Redwood City, Calif. startup called Neurotrack Technologies Inc. has created a brain health app that is helping scientists unravel the mysteries of memory, and work to find a cure for Alzheimer’s. It can detect signs of deteriorating brain health years before the first symptoms. Read more about it here. Meanwhile, Twitter has a new VP of Product, named Keith Coleman, who was until now CEO of Yes, Inc., startup acquired today by the big company.  Bullpen Capital, a venture firm that specializes in post-seed stage deals, has closed its third fund at $75 million. The company invests in startups that previously closed a seed round of investment and showed solid signs of traction, but have been dubbed too early for traditional VCs. Seismologists at UC Berkeley released MyShake, an app that passively monitors for seismic activity, both watching for earthquakes and warning users if one is underway. In the months since its introduction, the app has outperformed its creators’ expectations, detecting over 200 earthquakes in more than ten countries. Read more about the important app here.

Only two days left for the second round of the A – Selection (Audience Selection) at the Founders Games. Who are the TOP 3 challengers in the categories Hardware, Health and Infrastructure at the Founders Games? The best startups deserve to get free access to the Global Webit Congress and boost their business by receiving unparalleled networking with Investors, tech companies, biggest global advertisers and top reporters from major media. Here are the top three startups that are receiving most votes in the Categories Hardware, Health and Infrastructure:

Founders Games: Hardware

Ichanical from United Arab Emirates - They build "Junkbot"- A robotic kit which enables students to build robots from junk like water bottles, waste CD s,cardboards etc. It is an awesome platform to strengthen STEM knowledge and increase environmental awareness. Quad-S from Egypt - is developing Secure-Plus to protect internet users sensitive data from spywares attacks. SecurePlus-SP- is a credit-card size device fits in your wallet, Connected to your computer via USB Bluetooth, to protect everything you type in your web browser against hacking attacks (key strokes, key jacking and memory sniffing). Key.vi from Slovakia - Android door entry system supported by NFC technology.

Founders Games: Health

Faselty from Egypt - comes to utilize ICT to raise awareness among community members about the importance of blood donation and entice blood donors. Uberhealth from India - a cloud and mobile-based platform enabling people living away from parents to manage all aspects of elderly healthcare – scheduling appointments, diagnosis and healthcare monitoring, online consultation for second opinion, transportation, maintaining health records and billing. Spopal from Bulgaria - takes off your head the irritating process of organizing a sport event or find partners to play with.

Founders Games: Infrastructure

Storpool from Bulgaria - develops software-only storage solution that allows service providers, enterprises or other Cloud builders to run data storage on inexpensive standard servers, instead of expensive and inefficient storage arrays. BusPooling from Egypt - crowd-sourced Bus transportation service in Cairo. IT provides transportation for daily commuters (i.e. employees or students) between home and work university for a monthly subscription fee Segments Media & Accelerator from Austria - offers a 360* degree service for startups. There are hundreds of other fine startups participating in 16 categories at the Founders Games. Have you seen them yet? Choose your favorite startup and give it your support by voting now!