Interview with Sidekick Health CEO, Dr. Tryggvi Thorgeirsson

Most people living with chronic conditions have more than one, yet digital health is full of point solutions for specific conditions. Dr. Tryggvi Thorgeirsson transformed that insight into Sidekick Health, which takes a platform approach to addressing a patient's complex needs.

The company is growing fast, both organically and through acquisition. The latest addition, PINK! specializes in cancer care and women's health.

Tryggvi is from Iceland, and I enjoyed uncovering his fascinating journey. He shares personal stories from his time with a volunteer mountaineering rescue squad and his extensive educational path through the University of Iceland, MIT Media Lab, and Harvard School of Public Health.

I knew there were a lot of hot, emerging geothermal features in Iceland. Now I know of at least one hot, emerging digital health company, too.

As of March 2025 HealthBiz is part of CareTalk. Healthcare. Unfiltered and can be found at the following links:

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Host David E. Williams is president of healthcare strategy consulting firm Health Business Group.

Episodes through March 2025 were produced by Dafna Williams.

Transcript

0:00:01 - David Williams
Digital health is littered with point solutions for specific conditions, but most people living with chronic conditions have more than one. Today's guest has taken this insight to create a unified platform to synchronize interventions and personalize the patient experience. Hi everyone, I'm David Williams, president of strategy consulting firm Health Business Group and host of the Health Biz Podcast, where I interview top healthcare leaders about their lives and careers. My guest today is Dr Tryggvi Thorgeirsson, CEO of Sidekick Health, a fast-growing maker of digital health solutions. If you like this show, please subscribe and leave a review. Tryggvi Thorgeirsson, welcome to the Health Biz Podcast. Thank you very much. Well, it's great to have you here. I'd like to hear a little bit, before we talk about what you're doing now, about your childhood influences, anything that you learned then that stuck with you. 

0:01:02 - Tryggvi Thorgeirsson
Yeah, well, that's a big question. Of course, there's a lot of things that shape someone who's growing up. To mention a few, I mean, first off, I consider myself's healthy for a young person to get that kind of global perspective, living in many different countries and cultures, and so I'm thankful for that. In terms of other influences, my grandfather, whose namesake I am, so my grandfather Tryggvi he was a medical doctor and my mother's an epidemiologist. So I think I always grew up kind of in in with an interest in in medicine and the science of medicine. 

Um, on the other hand, my father, he's a geological engineer and and he he founded his own company some 20, 25 years ago and I was lucky enough to be able to work with him. We created some, some pretty cool patented technology that I was able to work with him on and learned quite a few lessons in terms of how to build and run your own company. So, yeah, and maybe one more thing that also influenced me was I was part of a. In my late teens I was part of a volunteer mountaineering rescue squad that we have here in Iceland, all around the island, and I think that also kind of shaped me. You know, dealing with harsh Icelandic nature and cultivating, I think, an urge to help others as well. So, yeah, some of the things I think have shaped who I am today. 

0:02:32 - David Williams
That sounds very good, and you've answered already a couple of my next questions, because you it looks like you went to University of Iceland, first for engineering and then for medicine, and then you'd also happen to be from the School of Public Health over here in Boston. 

0:02:46 - Tryggvi Thorgeirsson
And then you'd also have a degree from the School of Public Health over here in Boston. Yeah, absolutely Exactly, I think I've always been interested both in science and technology but also in health care, and when I graduated, as a doctor here in Iceland because it's a tiny nation in a very big country so you have to have doctors all around the island and do what we call rural medicine, where you're just the only doctor in a big area and doing what we call rural medicine where you're just the only doctor in a big area and so I really got an accelerated clinical experience through that and that shaped some of my views on what we could do better in healthcare that sounds good. 

Now help me understand what you were doing at the MIT Media Lab. Yeah well, first at the MIT Media Lab and then at Harvard Chan, I've been a guest lecturer talking about both data-driven health, meaning how we can use and that's especially what I was focused on at MIT is data-driven health, how we can use all the interesting different data insights that we can glean through all the devices and sensors all around us. Take that into account when making data-driven decisions on the next best thing and next best action in healthcare. So I was a guest lecturer there on that topic and then later at Harvard Chan, where I'm currently now, both on that and also how we can use behavioral sciences to better engage with patients and also get them, help them and support them to be more actively involved in their own care. 

0:04:03 - David Williams
Now you're running a company now called Sidekick Health as the CEO. Were you also involved in starting up that company or did you come to it later? 

0:04:11 - Tryggvi Thorgeirsson
No, I was the founder and so and that was, I think that was it all came together. I mean, I was working clinically and I felt very strongly that we could do things better and differently, and it's a few things that have always stuck with me in terms of how we could do things better. In healthcare, we tend to be very siloed with kind of point solutions or treating conditions individually as opposed to the patient as a whole. We tend to be very reactive, waiting for a disaster to occur instead of being proactive and stepping in early, and we're surprisingly brick and mortar based, so really lagging, I'd say, 10, 20 years behind some industries in terms of digitizing, how we help manage chronic conditions and so all of these things I felt we could do better During my studies in the US. There's a lot of things that influenced this. I mean using smart technology, behavior science, and then I came back to Iceland and founded the company with my friend from med school, sam, who was doing cardiology in Sweden at the same time. 

0:05:15 - David Williams
And what is it that Sidekick has developed? What is your offering? 

0:05:19 - Tryggvi Thorgeirsson
Yeah, so from the beginning we decided we didn't want to create a point solution, but we wanted to create a platform that could be applied across a wide range of conditions, because most people in healthcare, most patients, are dealing with two or more conditions at the same time, and most of our B2B clients if you think about a health insurance company or a pharma company of course there's dozens and dozens of conditions that they have to be able to address, and so there's heavy point solution, fatigue, and we wanted to create a platform which is what we've done that can be applied across all major conditions. So a core digital platform and a huge library of clinical content and then adapting that to dozens of these major conditions across cardiovascular and metabolic, inflammatory, women's health, oncology and others. 

0:06:02 - David Williams
So you mentioned adapting it. You have something called adaptive care paths. Can you describe what that is? 

0:06:08 - Tryggvi Thorgeirsson
Yeah, that's a technology which allows us because, as I said, we have all of these dozens of different therapies for, let's say, obesity or type 2 diabetes or anxiety or breast cancer, and if you have a patient who's dealing with some of those or maybe several of those conditions, adaptive care path technology, which is patented, allows us to tie all of these programs and therapies into one patient journey, so you, as a patient, just have one app and we activate the right care path for you to address all of these different things at the same time. 

0:06:40 - David Williams
How has the business evolved? It sounds like you have this big library of conditions, care paths, which I assume you've developed organically. But I know you've done at least a couple of acquisitions, and we'll talk a minute about the most recent one. But how do you think about the organic growth versus acquisitions? 

0:06:57 - Tryggvi Thorgeirsson
Yeah, I'm a big believer in a healthy combination of the two. I mean, up until last year, it's all been organic growth. We started I mean, of course, that they actually work and then, commercially, when we started commercially, we started working with pharma companies who we found to be quite early adopters of this type of technology. We're currently working with several of the world's biggest pharma companies, basically augmenting their pharmacotherapy with our digital therapies to get better patient outcomes, less drop off the medication and provide better data insights to understand the patient's needs. So that's how we started growing with pharma companies. Later on, we started also working with health insurance companies like Elevance Health in the US to get better patient outcomes and more efficient delivery of care. And so that's been, I'd say, our organic growth. 

We've always had our eyes on a prescription digital therapeutics market which is a really exciting part or segment of our world. We had a close eye, of course, on the US market but felt it wasn't quite ready for us to launch into. But the German market called DIGA is actually quite developed and mature for these types of solutions, and so last year we made an acquisition, acquired a company called ATIR, who have built a great product into that DIGA market in Germany. It's probably the world's most prescribed obesity therapy, achieving great results up to 27% weight loss for patients and so we bought the company, with this really strong product but also with very strong sales and marketing channels, into the German deco market, and we've continued to invest and scale up the sales and marketing channels and now made a second acquisition to add another product, another company, into that same infrastructure. 

0:09:06 - David Williams
Sounds good. So you're dealing with. You know you start with pharma, but then you're also dealing with payers, and you've got the US, and you've also got Europe, and you've got organic and you've got acquisition, so a lot of things to juggle, it sounds like. What are the key differences or tensions? Is it harder like is versus Europe pretty similar, but pharma versus a health plan is very different, or how does it? How do you think about it all coming together? 

0:09:28 - Tryggvi Thorgeirsson
That's a key question, of course, and I mean at the core it's always. It's always the same digital platform that we apply through all of these businesses. Through all of these businesses, it's more or less always the same therapies or clinical therapies that we deliver and, at the core, those therapies do three things. They help patients self-manage their condition, because there are so many things that people can do to fundamentally improve their outcomes. Secondly, it's helping them better understand and stick to their treatment, because lack of treatment deterrence is such a big problem in healthcare. And the third part is creating this remote bridge between the patient and their care team and using, of course, ai and technology to augment that whole interaction. So all of those fundamentals are there across these different business segments, but then, of course, the commercial dynamics are different and it's hard to generalize in terms of, like you said, us and Europe. But there are certain things and one example I mean in our prescription digital therapeutics business there are some important differences. One of the maybe most important things, as I said, we had our eyes ever since we founded the company. We wanted to go into that part you know prescription therapies because as a doctor, I want to be able to prescribe a digital therapy that has a proven impact, just like a medicine would do. But we felt that the US market was exciting but it was never quite ready yet. 

Maybe the most important difference in Germany and this is a more recent market but it's been growing very fast over the past four years is it has this central regulatory setup where medication authorities in Germany you know if a company like ours has a medical, you know software as a medical device and robust clinical data to prove the worth of your product. 

You can get listed by the medication authorities as an approved therapy and after that the doctor can prescribe and every health insurer then has to reimburse. So you don't have to walk, you know, payer by payer and ask them to reverse. It's governed centrally and with that the German market for prescription therapies has been growing very healthily about 75% year-on-year growth for the past few years and way beyond kind of pilot stage. Overall, I mean we're coming up on 100,000 prescribed and reimbursed therapies in that market and growing very fast, and so that's a huge difference between the US and European market in that aspect. On the other side, we're working heavily in the US with health insurers because I mean there's a lot of innovative power, I'd say, and ability to move fast in some cases with health insurers, the private health insurers in the US, whereas some of the more public health insurers in Europe tend to be more conservative in some cases. 

0:12:12 - David Williams
Now we're sitting here today and I have my just conventional white background and you have a very beautiful pink background and I don't know if that's because that's the company color or the national color of iceland, or just a coincidence, but you did recently acquire a company that I think is called pink. So what's the connection? 

0:12:30 - Tryggvi Thorgeirsson
well, we did have this this room before and we really love this meeting room. Uh, we have our meetings all have have our different brand colors, including the pink one, um, but no, yeah, so, uh, we, we did last month acquire a company, a great company in Germany, called Pink. I mentioned that last year we first acquired another company called A-Tier, which gave us both this great obesity product but also these very strong sales and marketing channels into the German market for prescription therapies. We've continued to invest in those channels, building up both a marketing engine and also a sales force that's going to German doctors to educate them on these therapies and help them prescribe, and we have now over 15,000 German doctors that are prescribing our therapies, and so it makes a lot of sense for us to then bring other therapies into those same channels. 

We've had our eyes on PINC for quite a while. It's founded by a really passionate clinician, a professor, pia Wolfing, who's been working clinically in breast cancer as one of the leading experts on breast cancer in Germany for the past 20 years. She built a fantastic product with her team that helps people who are dealing with breast cancer significantly reduce psychological distress which, of course, is a big factor in this disease significantly improve quality of life and reduce side effects from their treatment, and so really strong product. But hadn't been able to invest much in kind of sales and marketing and now we can bring that product and that team into our kind of umbrella and scale up the impact to our sales channels. So that's really exciting. And then both with the previous ATIR team and the Pink team and our own team, we're now together working on four new additional products to scale into the market. So definitely a kind of combined build-in-buy strategy there Great. 

0:14:16 - David Williams
How important is it to help patients achieve behavior change? How important is it to help patients achieve behavior change and how much of a role can these PDTs or prescription digital therapeutics, how much of an impact can they play? 

0:14:30 - Tryggvi Thorgeirsson
Yeah. So I mean, we've known for decades in healthcare that behavior change, if you can help people achieve it, can be as powerful as any other part of your therapy. It can be as or even more powerful than your medication or any other part of your therapy, because it can be as or even more powerful than your medication or any other part of the therapy. The tricky part is it's so difficult, and I think all of us know how difficult it is to achieve, uh, lasting behavior change. 

And so when I was studying at talbot, for example, um, what really fascinated me was the science of, you know, behavioral science, behavioral economics, um how we can better understand how we make our choices, our health related choices, and how we as clinicians can help people and nudge them into healthier habits. And at the same time, when I was studying there, smart technology was coming out and Just opening up these absolutely unprecedented channels into people's everyday lives, allowing us to much better support through that behavior change. So that's why I mean, as I said, we've seen amazing results. We've seen symptom improvements from 25 to 40, 50 percent in our clinical trials, cost of care savings in the thousands of dollars, and all these things that you can do by helping people effectively achieve lasting behavior change, and PDT is a part of that journey. 

0:15:48 - David Williams
There's been a lot of enthusiasm for digital therapeutics in the US, but at the same time, sometimes it hasn't actually hit the potential. So there was a company, pair Therapeutics maybe the best known company in the field, and they went bankrupt fairly recently, which has had a bit of a dampening effect in the US. What lessons do you take from Pair and what kind of impact does that have on Sidekick? 

0:16:12 - Tryggvi Thorgeirsson
Yeah, I mean, first off, I was very sad to see that happen to Pair because I mean, they've been in many ways trailblazers, or definitely been trailblazers, in the US PDT market and and I've been very impressed by what the team has achieved, the product they built, so I was sad to see this happen. 

But there are, of course, like you said, there are always lessons to be learned and there are also very big differences between the companies. I mean, first off, even though almost from the, we've been monitoring the US PDT market but we still hadn't decided to invest in taking our products into that market because we felt it wasn't quite ready yet, including some of these differences that I mentioned between the US and the German market. I mean, pear was developing point solutions for fairly narrow conditions, mainly around substance abuse, whereas we've taken this very different kind of platform approach for all these major conditions heart diseases and cancer and these major chronic conditions, and so I see quite a lot of differences also on the product level and commercialization wise as well, visualization wise as well. I mean quite a lot of cash that was being burned in sales and marketing and distribution and we've tried to be as efficient as we can on that front as well. 

0:17:27 - David Williams
You've grown the company quite a bit over the years, organically and then through acquisition more recently. 

0:17:37 - Tryggvi Thorgeirsson
What kind of plans do you have? 

to try to sustain that momentum, assuming that's the plan. Yeah, I mean I'm very grateful for the growth we've seen, especially, I'd say, since 2020, I mean with COVID, of course, that really accelerated the adoption of digital health across the world and we've been growing about 75% in compound annual growth rate over the past four years. So it's a very solid growth. Starting in the pharma business, where we're now working with several of the world's largest pharma companies and we see very good growth there and we'll continue to grow, both with new pharma partners we just added a very large pharma partner last month that I look forward to announcing so new pharma partners and also new brands within each pharma partner and new geographies. Also with our partners In the US US healthcare business. 

We're seeing very exciting growth both in our current partnerships and in our upcoming partnerships, so we'll definitely continue to grow there organically with new partners and as well as in the German market, where we see very healthy growth. Other countries in Europe are coming in the same direction. So France is taking up a similar regulatory infrastructure called PECAN, very similar to the one that we are in Germany. So we see an expansion opportunities into France, belgium, austria, other European markets, and so we'll continue to organically grow, but definitely we also think there are exciting consolidation opportunities both on the European side and the US side, and so we and our shareholders are quite bullish and enthusiastic on this combined organic and inorganic growth, maintaining 75% or more in terms of growth in the coming years. 

0:19:12 - David Williams
Great Well, I look forward to following the progress. My last question for you is changing things a little bit back onto the personal side, and I wonder if you have a chance to do any reading for pleasure, for fun or even for business, if you've read any good books lately, anything that you might recommend for our audience? 

0:19:29 - Tryggvi Thorgeirsson
Well, yeah. So of course I read a lot of business books, but over the summer I've tried to put that aside a bit and recharge, because running your own business tends to be a bit of a 24 7 thing. So I wanted to recharge and and engage in some of my other hobbies. Uh, I'm quite a nut for history and and geopolitics, and so one of the books I've been reading this summer uh, again actually reading um prisoners of geography. I think it's a pretty interesting book, helping um or making the point that some of the geopolitics that we see around us are to some extent shaped by the geography that we live in. I think that's an interesting book. And also been reading up on on some of history, you know, history of russia and china, to also help add some context to what we're seeing there. So that's some of the some of the books I've been up to. 

0:20:16 - David Williams
Uh, good a little light reading, which is terrific. Well, that's it for yet another episode of the Health Biz Podcast. I've been speaking today with Dr Tryggvi Thorgeirsson, CEO of Sidekick Health. Tryggvi, thanks for joining me today on the podcast. Thank you, David. My pleasure You've been listening to the Health Biz Podcast with me, David Williams, President of Health Business Group. I conduct in-depth interviews with leaders in healthcare, business and policy. If you like what you hear, go ahead and subscribe on your favorite service. While you're at it, go ahead and subscribe on your second and third favorite services as well. There's more good stuff to come and you won't want to miss an episode. If your organization is seeking strategy consulting services in healthcare, check out our website, healthbusinessgroupcom.